Free Pigs Have Wings by P. G. Wodehouse Page A

with a young man who, from the fact that she had never mentioned his name, must be somebody quite impossible appalled her. It revealed the child as what her brother Galahad would have called a hornswoggling highbinder, and anyone who has anything to do with highbinders knows that that is the very worst sort.
    It was with relief that she remembered that by tomorrow evening Penelope Donaldson would be safely back at Blandings Castle, well away from the Vail sphere of influence.
    What a haven and refuge Blandings Castle was, to be sure, felt Lady Constance. It seemed to her to have everything. Bracing air, picturesque scenery, old world peace and – best of all – not a Vail to be seen for miles.
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    When girls like Gloria Salt, planning dinner with an old friend, say they are going to dress, they use the word in its deepest and fullest sense, meaning that they propose to extend themselves and that such of the populace as are sharing the salle-à-manger with them will be well advised to wear smoked glasses. Jerry, waiting in the lobby of Mario’s restaurant some three hours later, was momentarily stunned by what came floating in through the revolving door twenty minutes or so after the time appointed for the tryst. Owing to the fact that their meetings for some years had been confined to the golf links and the luncheon table, he had forgotten how spectacular this girl could be when arrayed for the evening meal.
    Gloria Salt was tall and slim and the last word in languorous elegance. Though capable of pasting a golf ball two hundred yards and creating, when serving at tennis, the illusion that it was raining thunderbolts, her dark beauty made her look like a serpent of old Nile. A nervous host, encountering her on her way to dine, might have been excused for wondering whether to offer her a dry martini or an asp.
    He would have been wrong in either case. She would have declined the asp, and she now declined Jerry’s suggestion of a cocktail.
    ‘Never touch ’em. Can’t keep fit if you put that foul stuff into you. That’s what I told my future lord and master,’ said Gloria, as they seated themselves at their table. ‘Lay off those pink gins, Greg, I said, avoid those whisky sours, and while you’re about it cut out the starchy foods and take regular daily exercises, because a girl who marries a man who looks like you do at moment of going to press is going to have an uneasy feeling that she’s committing bigamy.’
    ‘How did he take that?’
    ‘He laughed at the wit. The satire didn’t go so well.’
    ‘He is stout, this Parsloe?’
    ‘He certainly gets his pennyworth out of a weighing machine.’
    Jerry was not unnaturally anxious to condense preliminaries to a minimum and come to the real business of the evening, but a host must be civil. He cannot plunge into business over the smoked salmon. He was, moreover, extremely curious to learn the inside story of the rift within the lute at which his guest had hinted – if hinted is the word – when speaking earlier in the day of Orlo, Lord Vosper. Jerry, who had known that handsomest ornament of the Peerage from boyhood days and was very fond of him, had been saddened by her tale of sundered hearts.
    ‘A bit of a change from the old Wasp,’ he ventured.
    ‘What old wasp?’
    ‘Boyish nickname for Vosper. I was at school with him.’
    ‘You were, were you? Borstal, I presume? Did you kick him?’
    ‘Of course I didn’t kick him. I loved him like a brother.’
    ‘The chance of a lifetime thrown away,’ said Miss Salt with bitterness. ‘If Orlo Vosper in his formative years had been thoroughly kicked twice a day, Sundays included, he might not have grown up the overbearing louse he has become.’
    ‘Would you call him an overbearing louse?’
    ‘I did. To his face.’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘On the tennis court at Eastbourne, and again when entering the club house. I’d have done it in the dressing-room, too, only he wasn’t there. They separate the