Free Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse

And when Ambrose entered and proved to know the fellow too, the hope really began to throw its chest out a bit. Mr Llewellyn had been rather impressed by Ambrose and could not bring himself to believe that he would hob-nob with spies.
    'Say,' he said.
    ‘ Yes?'
    'That young fellow that's just left. You seemed to know him. ’
    Oh, yes. I've known him some years. His name is Bodkin. We were at Oxford together. Excuse me -'
    'You were?' said Mr Llewellyn, on the verge of beginning to wonder what he had been making so much fuss about.
    'I was a year or two senior to him
    'But he's a friend of yours?'
    ‘ Oh, yes. ’
    'I have an idea I ran into him at Cannes.' 'Oh, yes? Excuse me -'
    'And I was wondering,' said Mr Llewellyn, 'if you happened to know what he is.' 'What he is? ’
    'What he does. What's his racket?' Ambrose Tennyson's face cleared.
    'Oh, I see what you mean. It's odd that you should have asked that, because it is certainly the last thing in the world anyone would take him for. But my cousin Gertrude assures me that it is true. He's a detective.'
    'A detective! ’
    That's right. A detective. Excuse me, won't you? I've got to run along and find my brother Reggie.'
    Chapter 7
    For some minutes after his companion had left him Mr Llewellyn sat where he was, once more congealed. Then a drove of flappers invaded the library, accompanied by some of the ship's junior officers, and he heaved himself up and went out. He wished for solitude.
    Ambrose Tennyson's words had struck that growing hope of his with a bludgeon, so that it lay dead by the wayside. It did not even quiver.
    His emotions, as he dragged himself from the room and made his way below, were almost exactly similar to those which he had experienced one morning about a year ago when, his doctor having recommended mild exercise, he had thrown a medicine ball at a muscular friend on Malibu Beach, and the muscular friend, throwing it back before he was ready for it, had hit him in the solar plexus. On that occasion the world had rocked about him, and it was rocking now.
    He went down to his state-room, more as a wounded animal seeks its lair than with any definite intention of doing anything when he got there, and the first thing he saw when he entered it was his wife's sister Mabel. Her sleeves were rolled up, and she was bending over a chair in which sat a slender youth of leaden complexion. She appeared to be giving him an osteopathic treatment.
    When a man who has come to a state-room to be alone with his thoughts finds that his wife's sister, whom he has never liked, has converted it during his absence into a clinic, his feelings in the first shock of the discovery are apt to be too deep for words. Mr Llewellyn's were. He stood gaping, and Mabel Spence looked at him over her shoulder in the calm and, as he considered, off-hand way which always annoyed him so much. There was an English playwright with horn-rimmed spectacles under contract at the Superba-Llewellyn who looked at him rather like that, and the fact had done much to give Ivor Llewellyn that dislike for English playwrights which was so prominent a feature of his spiritual make-up.
    'Hello,' said Mabel. 'Come-on in.'
    Her patient hospitably backed up the invitation.
    'Yes, come on in,' he said. ‘ I don't know who you are, sir, or what you're doing in a private state-room, but step right in.'
    'I shan't be long. I'm just curing Mr Tennyson's headache.' 'Mr Tennyson junior's headache.' 'Mr Tennyson junior's headache.'
    'Not to be confused,' proceeded the patient, 'with Mr Tennyson senior's headache, if he has one - which, I'm afraid, he hasn't. I don't know who you are, sir, or what you're doing in a private state-room, but I should like to tell you that this little girl-here - you don't mind me calling you "this little girl here"?'
    'Go right ahead.'
    This little girl here,' said Reggie, 'is an angel of mercy. You can search till you're blue in the face, but you'll never find a better description