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CARRY ON, JEEVES

the registry office to dig up another specimen lor my approval. They sent me Jeeves.

I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the night before I had been present

a t a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling

pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party a t Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl with a wonderful profile but steeped to the gills in serious purpose. I can’t give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling you that the book she’d given me to read was called “Types of Etliical Theory,” and that when I opened it at random, I struck a page beginning: —

“The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve.”

All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head. I was doing my best to skim through this bright little volume when the bell rang. I crawled off the sofa and opened the door. A kind of darkish sort of respectful Johnnie stood without.

“I was sent by the agency, sir,” he said. “I was given to understand that you required a valet.” I ’d have preferred an undertaker; but I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start. Meadowes had had flat feet and used to clump. This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet