P. G. Wodehouse
I found her in her boudoir getting outside a dish of tea and a crumpet.
I proceeded, therefore, to roam hither and thither about the grounds and messuages in the hope of locating her [...]
Jeeves entered, bearing a tray on which were glasses and a substantial shaker filled to the brim with the juice of the juniper berry. Bobbie drained her beaker with all possible speed and left us, saying that if she didn't get dressed, she'd be late for dinner, and Jeeves and I were alone, like a couple of bimbos in one of those movies where two strong men stand face to face and might is the only law.
And one had to remember that most of the bimbos to whom Roberta Wickham had been giving the bird through the years had been of the huntin', shootin' and fishin' type, fellows who had more or less shot their bolt after saying 'Eh, what?' and slapping their leg with a hunting crop.
Isn't he the bimbo who took the bread out of the mouths of the Thursday Review people? Chuck the blighter out of the window and we want to see him bounce.
I accused her in set terms of giving me the heave-ho in order that she could mercenarily marry a richer man.
She greeted me with a bright smile, and said: “Back already? Did you find it?” With a strong effort I mastered my emotion and replied curtly but civilly that the answer was in the negative. “No,” I said, “I did not find it.”
The dear old room was just as I'd left it, nothing changed, and my first move, of course, was to procure another chair and give the top of the armoire the once-over. It was a set-back to find that the cow-creamer wasn't there. I suppose these kleptomaniacs know a thing or two and don't hide the loot in the obvious place.
She greeted me with one of those piercing view-halloos which she had picked up on the hunting field in the days when she had been an energetic chivvier of the British fox.
“What makes you think that?” I asked, handkerchiefing my upper slopes, which had become considerably bedewed. I didn't like this line of talk at all.
When a loved aunt has sweated herself to the bone trying to save her god-child from the clutches of a New York playboy and learns that all her well-meant efforts have gone blue on her, it's only natural for her late brother's son to shudder in sympathy.
“A kleptomaniac,” I said. “Which means, if the term is not familiar to you, a chap who flits hither and thither pinching everything he can lay his hands on. [...] And if ever a man needed to be constantly under an eye, it's the above kleptomaniac. [...] He pinches things. Everything that isn't nailed down is grist to his mill.”
"Where's Kipper?" I asked, and was surprised to note that Bobbie was dancing round the room on the tips of her toes uttering animal cries, apparently ecstatic in their nature. "Reggie?" she said, suspending the farmyard imitations for a moment.
The furnishing of this Blue Room was solid and Victorian, it having been the GHQ of my Uncle Tom's late father, who liked things substantial. There was a four-poster bed, a chunky dressing-table, a massive writing table, divers chairs, pictures on the walls of fellows in cocked hats bending over females in muslin and ringlets and over at the far side a cupboard or armoire in which you could have hidden a dozen corpses.
Her eyes widened. She squeaked a bit. "Don't tell me she caught you bending again?" "Bending is right. I was half-way under the dressing-table. You and your singing," I said, and I'm not sure I didn't add the word "Forsooth!" Her eyes widened a bit further, and she squeaked another squeak.
No words had been exchanged between Upjohn and self on the journey out, but the glimpses I had caught of his face from the corner of the eyes had told me that he was grim and resolute, his supply of the milk of human kindness plainly short by several gallons. No hope, it seemed to me, of turning him from his fell purpose.
I had expected to freeze her young – or, rather, middle-aged – blood and have her perm stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine, and she hadn't moved a muscle. “Beshrew me,” I said, “you take it pretty calmly.”
Odd that he [Hamlet's ghost] should have said porpentine when he meant porcupine. Slip of the tongue, no doubt, as so often happens with ghosts.
I am, you will agree, mature, and in my earlier days I won no little praise for my skill at hunt-the-slipper. I remember one of the hostesses whose Christmas parties I attended comparing me to a juvenile bloodhound. An extravagant encomium, of course, but that is what she said.
“I said he had a criminal face.” “He can't help his face.” “He can help being a crook and an impostor. Calls himself a butler, does he? The police could shake that story. He's no more a butler than I am.”