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towards Pauline Stoker.
    I wonder if you would mind just going back a bit and running the mental eye over that part of our conversation which had had to do with the girl.
    Anything strike you about it?
    No?
    Oh, well, to get the full significance, of course, you ought to have been there and observed him. I am a man who can read faces, and Chuffy’s had seemed to me highly suggestive. Not only had its expression, as he spoke of Pauline, been that of a stuffed frog with a touch of the Soul’s Awakening about it, but it had also turned a fairly deepish crimson in colour. The tip of the nose had wiggled, and there had been embarrassment in the manner. The result being that I had become firmly convinced that the old schoolmate had copped it properly. Quick work, of course, seeing that he had only known the adored object a few days, but Chuffy is like that. A man of impulse and hot-blooded impetuosity. You find the girl, and he does the rest.
    Well, if it was so, it was all right with me. Nothing of the dog in the manger about Bertram. As far as I was concerned, Pauline Stoker could hitch up with anyone she liked and she would draw a hearty ‘Go to it!’ from the discarded suitor. You know how it is on quiet reflection in these affairs. For a time the broken heart, and then suddenly the healing conviction that one is jolly well out of it. I could still see that Pauline was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever met, but of the ancient fire which had caused me to bung my heart at her feet that night at the Plaza there remained not a trace.
    Analysing this, if analysing is the word I want, I came to the conclusion that this changed outlook was due to the fact that she was so dashed dynamic. Unquestionably an eyeful, Pauline Stoker had the grave defect of being one of those girls who want you to come and swim a mile before breakfast and rout you out when you are trying to snatch a wink of sleep after lunch for a merry five sets of tennis. And now that the scales had fallen from my eyes, I could see that what I required for the rôle of Mrs Bertram Wooster was something rather more on the lines of Janet Gaynor.
    But in Chuffy’s case these objections fell to the ground. He, you see, is very much on the dynamic side himself. He rides, swims, shoots, chivvies foxes with loud cries, and generally bustles about. He and this P. Stoker would make the perfect pair, and I felt that if there was anything I could do to push the thing along, it should be done unstintedly.
    So when at this point I saw Pauline coming out of the house and bearing down on me, obviously with a view to exchanging notes and picking up the old threads and what not, I did not leg it but greeted her with a bright ‘What ho!’ and allowed her to steer me into the shelter of a path that led through the rhododendron shrubbery.
    All of which goes to show to what lengths a Wooster will proceed when it is a question of helping a pal, because the last thing I really wanted was to be closeted with this girl. The first shock of meeting her was over, but I was still feeling far from yeasty at the prospect of a heart-to-heart talk. As our relations had been severed by post and the last time we had forgathered we had been an engaged couple, I wasn’t quite sure what was the correct note to strike.
    However, the thought that I might be able to put in a word for old Chuffy nerved me to the ordeal, and we parked ourselves on a rustic bench and got down to the agenda.
    ‘How perfectly extraordinary finding you here, Bertie,’ she began. ‘What are you doing in these parts?’
    ‘I am temporarily in retirement,’ I replied, pleased to find the conversational exchanges opening on what I might call an unemotional note. ‘I needed a place where I could play the banjolele in solitude, and I took this cottage.’
    ‘What cottage?’
    ‘I’ve got a cottage down by the harbour.’
    ‘You must have been surprised to see us.’
    ‘I was.’
    ‘More surprised than pleased,