Free Full Moon by P. G. Wodehouse Page B

and easily of dog biscuits. Lord Emsworth, informed by Prudence that on second thoughts she had changed her mind about doing good works, was as quietly happy as so excellent a man deserved to be. If he took but little part in the merry quips which flashed like lightning across the table, this was not due to any moodiness but simply to the fact that, having managed to elude his sister's vigilance for once, he had been able to bring his pig book in to dinner with him and was reading it under cover of the table.
    And of all that gay throng, the gayest was Tipton Plimsoll. Not even his enforced abstinence and the circumstance that as the honoured guest he was seated beside his formidable hostess could check the flow of his spirits. From time to time his eye went swivelling round to where Veronica sat, and each time the sight of her seemed to tap in him a new vein of brilliance.
    It was he who led the liveliest sallies. It was he who told the raciest anecdotes. It was he who, in between the soup and fish courses, entertained the company with a diverting balancing trick with a fork and a wineglass. For a time, in short, he was the spirit of Mirth incarnate.
    For a time, one says. To be specific, up to the moment of the serving of the entrée. For it was just then that the figures in the tapestries on the walls noted that a strange silence had fallen upon the young master of the revels and that he refused the entrée in a manner that can only be described as Byronic. Something, it was clear, had suddenly gone amiss with Tipton Plimsoll.
    The fact was that, taking another of his rapt looks at Veronica, he had been stunned to observe her slap Freddie roguishly on the wrist, at the same time telling him not to be so silly, and the spectacle had got right in among his vital organs and twisted them into a spiral.
    For some time he had been aware that these two had seemed to be getting along pretty darned well together, but, struggling to preserve the open mind, he had told himself that a certain chumminess between cousins had always to be budgeted for. This wrist-slapping sequence, however, was another matter. It seemed to him to go far beyond mere cousinly good will. He was a man of strong passions, and the green-eyed monster ran up his leg and bit him to the bone.
    'No, thank you,' he said coldly to the footman who was trying to interest him in chicken livers and pastry.
    And yet, had he but known it, in what had caused Veronica to slap Freddie on the wrist there had been nothing to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty. All that had happened was that Freddie had told her in a confidential undertone that a Donaldson's dog biscuit was so superbly wholesome as to be actually fit for human consumption. Upon which, as a girl of her mentality might have been expected to do, she had slapped him playfully on the wrist and told him not to be so silly.
    But Tipton, not being in possession of the facts, writhed from stem to stern and relapsed into a dark silence. And this so concerned Lady Hermione that she sought for first causes. Following his sidelong glances, she understood the position of affairs, and registered a resolve to have a heart-to-heart talk with Freddie at the conclusion of the meal. She also promised herself a word with her daughter.
    The latter of these two tasks she was able to perform when the female members of the party rose and left the men to their port. And so well did she perform it that the first thing Tipton beheld on entering the drawing-room was Veronica Wedge advancing towards him, a fleecy wrap about her lovely shoulders.
    'Mummie says would you like to see the garden by moonlight,' she said, in her direct way.
    A moment before Tipton had been feeling that life was a hollow thing, for on top of the spectacle of this girl slapping the wrists of other men there had come the agony of watching his host, his host's son, and his host's brother-in-law lowering port by the pailful while he was forced to remain