They peered at me for a while as if I were something in a glass case, and I goggled back and had a good look at the girl. There’s no doubt about it, she was different from what Aunt Agatha had called the bold girls one meets in London nowadays. No bobbed hair and gaspers about her ! I don’t know when I’ve met anybody who looked so⁠—respectable is the only word. She had on a kind of plain dress, and her hair was plain, and her face was sort of mild and saintlike. I don’t pretend to be a Sherlock Holmes or anything of that order, but the moment I looked at her I said to myself, ā€œThe girl plays the organ in a village church!ā€

Well, we gazed at one another for a bit, and there was a certain amount of chitchat, and then I tore myself away. But before I went I had been booked up to take brother and the girl for a nice drive that afternoon. And the thought of it depressed me to such an extent that I felt there was only one thing to be done. I went straight back to my room, dug out the cummerbund, and draped it round the old tum. I turned round and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang.

398