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this incompetent ex-Roedean hockey-knocker whom you have foisted upon Clarence in the capacity of pig girl. Clarence and I have been discussing it, and we are in complete agreement that Simmons must be given the old heave-ho. The time has come to take her by the seat of her breeches and cast her into outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Good God, are you prepared to stand before the bar of world opinion as the woman who, by putting up with your bally Simmonses, jeopardized the Empress’s chance of performing the unheard of feat of winning the Fat Pigs medal for the third year in succession? A pig man, and the finest pig man money can procure, must place his hand upon the tiller in her stead. No argument, Constance. This is final.’
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    It is always a disturbing thing to be threatened. In an unpublished story by Gerald Vail there is a scene where a character with a criminal face sidles up to the hero as he pauses on Broadway to light a cigarette and hisses in his ear ‘Say, listen, youse! Youse’ll get out of this town if youse knows what’s good for youse!’, and the hero realizing from this that Louis The Lip’s Black Moustache gang have become aware of the investigations he has been making into the bumping off of the man in the green fedora, draws in his breath sharply and, though a most intrepid young man, is conscious of a distinct chill down the spine.
    Precisely the same sort of chill was cooling off the spine of Sir Gregory Parsloe as he limped back to Matchingham Hall. His encounter with Gally had shaken him. He was not an imaginative man, but a man did not have to be very imaginative to read into Gally’s words the threat of unilateral action against Queen of Matchingham. True, the fellow had spoken of ‘reprisals’, as though to imply that hostilities would not be initiated by the Blandings Castle gang, but Sir Gregory’s mental retort to this was ‘Reprisals my left eyeball’. The Galahad Threepwood type of man does not wait politely for the enemy to make the first move. It acts, and acts swiftly and without warning, and the only thing to do is to mobilize your defences and be prepared.
    His first act, accordingly, on arriving at Matchingham Hall, sinking into an arm chair and taking off his shoes, was to ring the bell and desire his butler to inform George Cyril Wellbeloved, his pig man, that his presence was desired for a conference. And in due season a rich smell of pig came floating in, closely followed by George Cyril in person.
    George Cyril Wellbeloved was a long, lean, red-haired man with strabismus in the left eye. This rendered his left eye rather unpleasant to look at, and as even the right eye was nothing to cause lovers of the beautiful to turn handsprings, one can readily understand why Sir Gregory, during the chat which followed, preferred to avert his gaze as much as possible.
    But, after all, what is beauty? Skin deep, you might say. His O. C. Pigs had a mouth like a halibut’s, a broken nose acquired during a political discussion at the Emsworth Arms and lots of mud all over him, but when you are engaging a pig man, Sir Gregory felt, you don’t want a sort of male Miss America, you want someone who knows about pigs. And what George Cyril Wellbeloved did not know about pigs could have been written on one of Maudie Montrose’s picture postcards.
    In terse, nervous English Sir Gregory related the substance of his interview with Gally, stressing that bit about the poisoned potatoes, and George Cyril listened with a gravity which became him well.
    ‘So there you are,’ said Sir Gregory, having completed his tale. ‘What do you make of it?’
    George Cyril Wellbeloved was a man who went in for a certain verbal polish in his conversation.
    ‘To speak expleasantly, sir,’ he said, ‘I think the old — means to do the dirty on us.’
    It would perhaps have been more fitting had Sir Gregory at this point said ‘Come, come, my man, be more careful with your