Aunt Agatha Takes the Count

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      “Jeeves,” I said, “we’ve backed a winner.”

      “Sir?”

      “Coming to this place, I mean. Here we are in a topping hotel, with fine weather, good cooking, golf, bathing, gambling of every variety, and my Aunt Agatha miles away on the other side of the English Channel. I ask you, what could be sweeter?”

      I had had to leg it, if you remember, with considerable speed from London because my Aunt Agatha was on my track with a hatchet as the result of the breaking-off of my engagement to Honoria Glossop. The thing hadn’t been my fault, but I couldn’t have convinced Aunt Agatha of that if I’d argued for a week: so it had seemed to me that the judicious course to pursue was to buzz briskly off while the buzzing was good. I was standing now at the window of the extremely decent suite which I’d taken at the Hotel Splendide at Roville on the French coast, and, as I looked down at the people popping to and fro in the sunshine, and reflected that in about a quarter of an hour I was due to lunch with a girl who was the exact opposite of Honoria Glossop in every way, I felt dashed uplifted. Gay, genial, happy-go-lucky, and devil-may-care, if you know what I mean.

      I had met this girl—Aline Hemmingway her name was—for the first time on the train coming from Paris. She was going to Roville to wait there for a brother who was due to arrive from England. I had helped her with her baggage, got into conversation, had a bite of dinner with her in the restaurant-car, and the result was we had become remarkably chummy. I’m a bit apt, as a rule, to give the modern girl a miss, but there was something different about Aline Hemmingway.

      I turned round, humming a blithe melody, and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang.

      I had rather been expecting some such display of emotion on the man’s part, for I was trying out a fairly fruity cummerbund that morning—one of those silk contrivances, you know, which you tie round your waist, something on the order of a sash, only more substantial. I had seen it in a shop the day before and hadn’t been able to resist it, but I’d known all along that there might be trouble with Jeeves. It was a pretty brightish scarlet.

      “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, in a sort of hushed voice. “You are surely not proposing to appear in public in that thing?”

      “What, Cuthbert the Cummerbund?” I said, in a careless, debonair way, passing it off. “Rather!”

      “I should not advise it, sir, really I shouldn’t.”

      “Why not?”

      “The effect, sir, is loud in the extreme.”

      I tackled the blighter squarely. I mean to say, nobody knows better than I do that Jeeves is a master-mind and all that, but, dash it, a fellow must call his soul his own. You can’t be a serf to your valet.

      “You know, the trouble with you, Jeeves,” I said, “is that you’re too—what’s the word I want?—too bally insular. You can’t realize that you aren’t in Piccadilly all the time. In a place like this, simply dripping with the gaiety and joie-de-vivre of France, a bit of colour and a touch of the poetic is expected of you. Why, last night at the Casino I saw a chappie in a full evening suit of yellow velvet.”

      “Nevertheless, sir——”

      “Jeeves,” I said, firmly, “my mind is made up. I’m in a foreign country; it’s a corking day; God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, and this cummerbund seems to me to be called for.”

      “Very good, sir,” said Jeeves, coldly.

      Dashed upsetting, this sort of thing. If there’s one thing that gives me the pip, it’s unpleasantness in the home; and I could see that relations were going to be pretty fairly strained for a while. I suppose the old brow must have been a bit furrowed or something, for Aline Hemmingway spotted that things were wrong directly we sat down to lunch.

      “You seem depressed, Mr. Wooster,” she said. “Have you been losing money at the Casino?”

      “No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I won quite a goodish sum last night.”

      “But something is the matter. What is it?”

      “Well, to tell you the truth,” I said, “I’ve just had rather a painful scene with my man, and it’s shaken me a bit. He doesn’t like this cummerbund.”

      “Why, I’ve just been admiring it. I think it’s very becoming.”

      “No, really?”

      “It has rather a Spanish effect.”

      “Exactly what I thought myself. Extraordinary you should have said that. A touch of the hidalgo, what? Sort of Vincente y Blasco What’s-his-name stuff. The jolly old hidalgo off to the bull-fight, what?”

      “Yes. Or a corsair of the Spanish Main.”

      “Absolutely! I say, you know, you have bucked me up. It’s a rummy thing about you—how sympathetic you are, I mean. The ordinary girl you meet to-day is all bobbed hair and gaspers, but you——”

      I was about to continue in this strain, when somebody halted at our table, and the girl jumped up.

      “Sidney!” she cried.

      The chappie who had anchored in our midst was a small, round cove with a face rather like a sheep. He wore pince-nez, his expression was benevolent, and he had on one of those collars which button at the back. A parson, in fact.

      “Well, my dear,” he said, beaming pretty freely, “here I am at last.”

      “Are you very tired?”

      “Not at all. A most enjoyable journey, in which tedium was rendered impossible by the beauty of the scenery through which we passed and the entertaining conversation of my fellow-travellers. But may I be presented to this gentleman?” he said, peering at me through the pince-nez.

      “This is Mr. Wooster,” said the girl, “who was very kind to me coming from Paris. Mr.