curse has come upon us, Jeeves. She wants me to go and join her at—what’s the name of the dashed place?—at Roville-sur-mer. Oh, hang it
“I had better be packing, sir?”
“I suppose so.”
To people who don’t know my Aunt Agatha I find it extraordinarily difficult to explain why it is that she has always put the wind up me to such a frightful extent.
I mean, I’m not dependent on her financially or anything like that. It’s simply personality, I’ve come to the conclusion. You see, all through my childhood and when I was a kid at school she was always able to turn me inside out with a single glance, and I haven’t come out from under the ’fluence yet.
We run to height a bit in our family, and there’s about five-foot-nine of Aunt Agatha, topped off with a beaky nose, an eagle eye, and a lot of grey hair, and the general effect is pretty formidable.
Anyway, it never even occurred to me for a moment to give her the miss-in-baulk on this occasion. If she said I must go to Roville, it was all over except buying the tickets.
“What’s the idea, Jeeves? I wonder why she wants me.”
“I could not say, sir.”
Well, it was no good talking about it. The only gleam of consolation, the only bit of blue among the clouds, was the fact that at Roville I should at last be able to wear the rather fruity cummerbund I had bought six months ago and