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and, like all men who sing through megaphones
nowadays, ladling out stuff well calculated to melt the hardest heart.
    It’s an
odd thing. I know one or two song writers and have found them among the most
cheery of my acquaintances, ready of smile and full of merry quips and so
forth. But directly they put pen to paper they never fail to take the dark
view. All that ‘We’re-drifting-apart-you’re-breaking-my-heart’ stuff, I mean to
say. The thing this bird was putting across per megaphone at the moment was
about a chap crying into his pillow because the girl he loved was getting
married next day, but — and this was the point or nub — not to him. He didn’t
like it. He viewed the situation with concern. And the megaphonist was
extracting every ounce of juice from the set-up.
    Some
fellows, no doubt, would have taken advantage of this outstanding goo to
plunge without delay into what Jeeves calls medias res, but I, being
shrewd, knew that you have to give these things time to work. So, having
ordered kippers and a bottle of what would probably turn out to be rat poison,
I opened the conversation on a more restrained note, asking her how the new
novel was coming along. Authors, especially when female, like to keep you
posted about this.
    She
said it was coming very well but not quickly, because she was a slow, careful
worker who mused a good bit in between paragraphs and spared no pains to find
the exact word with which to express what she wished to say. Like Flaubert, she
said, and I said I thought she was on the right lines.
    ‘Those,’
I said, ‘were more or less my methods when I wrote that thing of mine for the Boudoir.’
    I was
alluding to the weekly paper for the delicately nurtured, Milady’s Boudoir, of
which Aunt Dahlia is the courteous and popular proprietor or proprietress. She
has been running it now for about three years, a good deal to the annoyance of
Uncle Tom, her husband, who has to foot the bills. At her request I had once
contributed an article — or ‘piece’, as we journalists call it — on What The
Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing.
    ‘So
you’re off to Brinkley tomorrow,’ I went on. ‘You’ll like that.
    Fresh
air, gravel soil, company’s own water, Anatole’s cooking and so forth.’
    ‘Yes.
And of course it will be wonderful meeting Daphne Dolores Morehead.’
    The
name was new to me.
    ‘Daphne
Dolores Morehead?’
    ‘The
novelist. She is going to be there. I admire her work so much. I see, by the
way, she is doing a serial for the Boudoir.’
    ‘Oh,
yes?’ I said, intrigued. One always likes to hear about the activities of one’s
fellow—writers.
    ‘It
must have cost your aunt a fortune. Daphne Dolores Morehead is frightfully
expensive. I can’t remember what it is she gets a thousand words, but it’s
something enormous.’
    ‘The
old sheet must be doing well.’
    ‘I
suppose so.’
    She
spoke listlessly, seeming to have lost interest in Milady’s Boudoir. Her
thoughts, no doubt, had returned to Stilton. She cast a dull eye hither and
thither about the room. It had begun to fill up now, and the dance floor was
congested with frightful bounders of both sexes.
    ‘What
horrible people!’ she said. ‘I must say I am surprised that you should be
familiar with such places, Bertie. Are they all like this?’
    I
weighed the question.
    ‘Well,
some are better and some worse. I would call this one about average. Garish, of
course, but then you said you wanted something garish.’
    ‘Oh,
I’m not complaining. I shall make some useful notes. It is just the sort of
place to which I pictured Rollo going that night.’
    ‘Rollo?’
    ‘The
hero of my novel. Rollo Beaminster.’
    ‘Oh, I
see. Yes, of course. Out on the tiles, was he?’
    ‘He was
in wild mood. Reckless. Desperate. He had lost the girl he loved.’
    ‘What
ho!’ I said. ‘Tell me more.’
    I spoke
with animation and vim, for whatever you may say of Bertram Wooster, you cannot
say that he does not know a