Free Full Moon by P. G. Wodehouse

on the third floor Tipton Plimsoll, having finished a strengthening rusk, was washing it down with a glass of milk, exactly as foreshadowed.
    From time to time, in between the sips, he looked quickly over his shoulder. Then, seeming reassured, he resumed the lowering of the wholesome fluid.

CHAPTER 4
    To travel from Paddington to Market Blandings takes a fast train about three hours and forty minutes. Prudence Garland, duly bunged into the twelve-forty-two by her mother's butler, reached her destination shortly before five, in nice time for a cup of tea and a good cry.
    A prospective bride, torn from her betrothed on her wedding morning, is seldom really lively company, and Prudence provided no exception to this generalization. Tipton Plimsoll, now violently prejudiced against Bill Lister's face, might have wondered why anyone should be fussy about not being allowed to marry a man with such a map, but she could not see it that way. She made no secret of the fact that she viewed the situation with concern, and her deportment from the start would have cast a shadow on a Parisian Four Arts Ball.
    It is not surprising, therefore, that Tipton's first impression of the ancient home of the Emsworths, when he arrived an hour or so later in the car with Freddie, should have been one of melancholy. Even though Prudence was absent at the moment, having taken her broken heart out for an airing in the grounds, an atmosphere of doom and gloom still pervaded the premises like the smell of boiling cabbage. Tipton was not acquainted with the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, and so had never heard
of the House of Usher, but a more widely read man in his place might well have supposed himself to have crossed the threshold of that rather depressing establishment.
    This note of sombreness was particularly manifest in Lord Emsworth. A kind-hearted man, he was always vaguely pained when one of his numerous nieces came to serve her sentence at Blandings for having loved not wisely but too well; and in addition to this, almost the first of Prudence's broken utterances, as she toyed with her tea and muffins, had been the announcement that, life being now a blank for her, she proposed to devote herself to the doing of good works.
    He knew what that meant. It meant that his study was going to be tidied again. True, all the stricken girl had actually said was that she intended to interest herself in the Infants' Bible Class down in Blandings Parva, but he knew the thing would go deeper than that. From superintending an Infants' Bible Class to becoming a Little Mother and tidying studies is but a step.
    His niece Gertrude, while doing her stretch for wanting to marry the curate, had been, he recalled, a very virulent study tidier; and he saw no reason to suppose that Prudence, once she had settled down and hit her stride, would not equal, or even surpass, her cousin's excesses in this direction. For the moment she might slake her thirst for good works with Bible classes, but something told Lord Emsworth that in doing so she would be merely warming up, simply hitting fungoes.
    Add to these nameless fears the fact that the sight of his younger son Frederick had had its usual effect on the sensitive peer, and one can understand why, during the committee of welcome's reception of Tipton Plimsoll, he should have sat hunched up in a corner with his head in his hands, shivering a good deal and taking no part in the conversation. One does not
say that the perfect host might not have acted differently. All one says is that one can understand.
    The despondency of Colonel Wedge and the Lady Hermione, his wife, almost equally pronounced, was due only in part to the miasma cast upon the Blandings scene by Prudence. Their outlook was darkened in addition by another tragedy. On this day of days, just when it was so vital for her to be in midseason form for making an impression on young millionaires, a gnat had bitten their daughter Veronica on the tip of her nose, the