and the bloke with the voice had grabbed me by the arm.
It was Sir Roderick Glossop!
The next thing that happened was a bit of a lull in the proceedings. For about three and a quarter seconds, or possibly more, we just stood there, drinking each other in, so to speak, the old boy still attached with a limpet-like grip to my elbow.
If I hadn’t been in a dressing-gown and he in pink-striped pyjamas, and if he hadn’t been glaring quite so much as if he were shortly going to commit a murder, the tableau would have looked rather like one of those advertisements you see in the magazines, where the experienced elder is patting the young man’s arm and saying to him, “My boy, if you subscribe to the Mutt-Jeff Correspondence School of Oswego, Kan. , as I did, you may some day, like me, become Third Assistant Vice-President of the Schenectady Consolidated Nail-File and Eyebrow-Tweezer Corporation.”
“You!” said Sir Roderick, finally. And in this connection I want to state that it’s all rot to say you can’t hiss a word that hasn’t an s in it. The way he pushed out that “You!” sounded like an angry cobra, and I am betraying no secrets when I mention that it did me no good whatsoever.
By rights, I suppose, at this point I ought to have said something. The best I could manage, however, was a