Free Ice in the Bedroom by P. G. Wodehouse Page A

lower will those unhappy blighters' jaws drop. But I can't help their troubles. Suppose they do lose their shirts? Money isn't everything.'
    'You can't take it with you.'
    'Exactly. After seeing Saxby, look in on them and tell them that. It'll cheer them up. But do you know who's going to howl like a timber wolf about this?'
    'The whole firm, I should say. They rely on you for their annual holiday-at-Blackpool expenses.'
    'Prosser, that's who. He's got a wad of money in the business, and when he finds I'm putting it in jeopardy, he'll hit the ceiling. Oh, well, no good worrying about Prosser. Into each life some rain must fall. Go and get the car.'
    Sally got the car, and as they drove off and were passing Peacehaven startled her employer by uttering a sudden exclamation.
    'Now what?' said Leila Yorke.
    'Nothing,' said Sally.
     
    But it had not been nothing. What had caused her to exclaim had been the sight of a spectacular blonde leaning on the Peacehaven front gate, as if, so it seemed to her jaundiced eye, the place belonged to her. The last thing a girl likes to see leaning in this manner on the gate of the man she loves, especially when she knows him to be one of the opposite sex's greatest admirers, is a blonde of that description. Even a brunette would have been enough to start a train of thought in Sally's mind, and she passed the remainder of the short journey to the metropolis in silence, a prey to disturbing reflections on the subject of leopards and spots and the well-known inability of the former to change the latter. It was only when the car had been housed at a garage near Berkeley Square and she and Leila Yorke had parted, the one to do her shopping, the other to go and ruin the morning of Mr. Saxby, the literary agent, and of the Messrs. Popgood and Grooly, Miss Yorke's poor perishing publishers, that there came to her a consoling reflection - to wit, that Freddie had told her that he shared Peacehaven with his cousin George, the sleepless guardian of the law. Policemen, she knew, have their softer side and like, when off duty, to sport with Amaryllis in the shade. No doubt the spectacular one was a friend of George's. As she entered the premises of the Saxby literary agency, Freddie having thus been dismissed without a stain on his character, she was feeling quite happy.
    So, as she leaned on the gate of Peacehaven and watched the car disappear round the corner, was Dolly Molloy. Everything, as she envisaged it, was now hunkadory. There remained only the task of walking a few yards, slipping in through a back door, mounting a flight of stairs, picking up a chamois leather bag and going home, a simple programme which she was confident would be well within her scope. And she was opening the gate as a preliminary to the first stage of the venture, when from immediately behind her a voice spoke, causing her to skip like the high hills and swallow the chewing gum with which she had been refreshing herself.
    'Oh, hullo,' it said, and turning she perceived a tall, superbly muscled young man, at the sight of whom her hazel eyes, which had been shining with a glad light, registered dismay and horror. This was not because she disliked tall, superbly muscled young men or because the Oxford accent in which he had spoken jarred upon her transatlantic ear; it was due to the circumstance that the other was wearing the uniform and helmet of a policeman, and if there was one thing a checkered life had taught her to shrink from, it was the close proximity of members of the force. No good, in her experience, ever came of it.
    'You waiting for Freddie Widgeon? I'm afraid he's gone up to London.'
    'Oh?' said Dolly. It was all she found herself able to say. The society of coppers, peelers, flatfeet, rozzers and what are known in the newest argot of her native land as 'the fuzz' always affected her with an unpleasant breathlessness.
    'He works in an office, poor devil, and has to leave pretty soon after the morning repast. Around