Free Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by Sir P G Wodehouse

had left. He
seemed a shade perturbed.
    'We were interrupted in our recent conversation, sir.'
    'We were, Jeeves, and I am glad to say that I no longer need
your advice. During your absence the situation has become
clarified. A meeting has been arranged and will shortly take
place, in fact here at this cottage at three o'clock tomorrow
afternoon. I, not wishing to intrude, shall be going for a walk.'
    'Extremely gratifying, sir,' he said, and I agreed with him
that he had tetigisti- ed the rem acu.

CHAPTER NINE
    At five minutes to three on the following afternoon I had
girded my loins and was preparing to iris out, when
Vanessa Cook arrived. The sight of me appeared to displease
her. She frowned as if I were something that didn't smell just
right, and said:
    'Haven't you gone yet?'
    I considered this a shade brusque, even for a proud beauty,
but, true to my resolve to be preux, I responded suavely:
    'Just going.'
    'Well, go,' she said, and I went.
    The street outside was as usual, offering little
entertainment to the sightseer. A few centenarians were
dotted about, exchanging reminiscences of the Boer War, and
the eye detected a dog which had interested itself in
something it had found in the gutter, but otherwise it was
empty. I walked down it and had a look at the Jubilee
watering-trough and was walking back on the other side,
thinking how pleased E. J. Murgatroyd would be if he could
see me, when I caught sight of the shop which acted as a post
office and remembered that Jeeves had told me that in
addition to selling stamps, picture postcards, socks, boots,
overalls, pink sweets, yellow sweets, string, cigarettes and
stationery it ran a small lending library.
    I went in. I had come away rather short of reading matter,
and it never does to neglect one's intellectual side.
    Like all village lending libraries, this one had not bothered
much about keeping itself up to date, and I was hesitating
between By Order Of The Czar and The Mystery Of A Hansom Cab, which seemed the best bets, when the door opened to
Angelica Briscoe, the personable wench I had met at lunch.
The vicar's daughter, if you remember.
    Her behaviour on seeing me was peculiar. She suddenly
became all conspiratorial, as if she had been a Nihilist in By Order Of The Czar meeting another Nihilist. I had not yet read
that opus, but I assumed that it was full of Nihilists who were
always meeting other Nihilists and plotting dark plots with
them. She clutched my arm and lowering her voice to a sinister
whisper said:
    'Has he brought it yet?'
    I missed her drift by a wide margin. I like to think of myself
as a polished man of the world who can kid back and forth
with a pretty girl as well as the next chap, but I must confess
that my only response to this query was a silent goggle. It
struck me as unusual that a vicar's daughter should be a
member of a secret society, but I could think of no other
explanation for her words. They had sounded like a secret
code, the sort of thing you haven't a hope of making sense of
if you aren't a unit of The Uncanny Seven in good standing
with all your dues paid up.
    Eventually I found speech. Not much of it, but some.
    'Eh?' I said.
    She seemed to feel that her question had been answered.
Her manner changed completely. She dropped the By Order Of The Czar stuff and became the nice girl who in all probability
played the organ in her father's church.
    'I see he hasn't. But of course one has to give him time for a
job like that.'
    'Like what?'
    'I can't explain. Here's Father.'
    And the Reverend Briscoe ambled in, his purpose, as it
appeared immediately, to purchase half a pound of the pink
sweets and half a pound of the yellow as a present for the
more deserving of his choir boys. His presence choked the
personable wench off from further revelations, and the only
conversation that followed had to do with the weather, the
condition of the church roof and how-well-your-aunt-is
looking-it-was-such-a-pleasure-seeing-her-again. And after