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to camp out by the lake.’
    ‘And Emsworth
doesn’t like them?’
    ‘Nobody
could, except their mothers. No, he eyes them askance. They ruin the scenery,
poison the air with their uncouth cries, and at the recent school treat, so he
tells me, knocked off his top hat with a crusty roll.’
    Pongo
shook his head censoriously.
    ‘He
shouldn’t have worn a topper at a school treat,’ he said. He was remembering
functions of this kind into which he had been lured at one time and another by
clergymen’s daughters for whose charms he had fallen. The one at Maiden Eggesford
in Somerset, when his great love for Angelica Briscoe, daughter of the Rev P.
P. Briscoe, who vetted the souls of the peasantry in that hamlet, had led him
to put his head in a sack and allow himself to be prodded with sticks by the
younger set, had never been erased from his memory. ‘A topper! Good Lord! Just
asking for it!’
    ‘He
acted under duress. He would have preferred to wear a cloth cap, but Connie
insisted. You know how persuasive she can be.’
    ‘She’s
a tough baby.’
    ‘Very
tough. Let us hope she takes to Bill Bailey.’.
    ‘Does
what?’
    ‘Oh, I
didn’t tell you, did I? Bill is accompanying me to Blandings.’
    ‘What!’
    ‘Yes, Emsworth
very kindly included him in his invitation. We’re off tomorrow on the 11.45,
singing a gypsy song.’
    Horror
leaped into Pongo’s eyes. He started violently, and came within an ace of
spilling his martini with a spot of lemon peel in it. Fond though he was of his
Uncle Fred, he had never wavered in his view that in the interests of young
English manhood he ought to be kept on a chain and seldom allowed at large.
    ‘But my
gosh!’
    ‘Something
troubling you?’
    ‘You
can’t … what’s the word … you can’t subject poor old Bill to this frightful
ordeal.’
    Lord
Ickenham’s eyebrows rose.
    ‘Well,
really, Pongo, if you consider it an ordeal for a young man to be in the same
house with the girl he loves, you must have less sentiment in you than I had
supposed.’
    ‘Yes,
that’s all very well. His ball of fluff will be there, I agree. But what good’s
that going to do him when two minutes after his arrival Lady Constance grabs
him by the seat of the trousers and heaves him out?’
    ‘I
anticipate no such contingency. You seem to have a very odd idea of the sort of
thing that goes on at Blandings Castle, my boy. You appear to look on that
refined home as a kind of Bowery saloon with bodies being hurled through the
swing doors all the time, and bounced along the sidewalk. Nothing of that
nature will occur. We shall be like a great big family. Peace and good will
everywhere. Too bad you won’t be with us.
    ‘I’m
all right here, thanks,’ said Pongo with a slight shudder as he recalled some
of the high spots of his previous visit to the castle. ‘But I still maintain
that when Lady Constance hears the name Bailey —’
    ‘But
she won’t. You don’t suppose a shrewd man like myself would have overlooked a
point like that. He’s calling himself Cuthbert Meriwether. I told him to write
it down and memorize it.’
    ‘She’ll
find out.’
    ‘Not a
chance. Who’s going to tell her?’
    Pongo
gave up the struggle. He knew the futility of arguing, and he had just
perceived the bright side to the situation — to wit, that after tomorrow more
than a hundred miles would separate him from his amiable but hair-bleaching
relative. The thought was a very heartening one. Going by the form book, he
took it for granted that ere many suns had set the old buster would be up to
some kind of hell which would ultimately stagger civilization and turn the moon
to blood, but what mattered was that he would be up to it at Lord Emsworth’s
rural seat and not in London. How right, he felt, the author of the well-known
hymn had been in saying that peace, perfect peace is to be attained only when
loved ones are far away.
    ‘Let’s
go in and have some dinner,’ he