Page:Carry On, Jeeves.pdf/17

16 CARRY ON, JEEVES

I knew he wouldn't have any objection to Florence, having known her lather since they were at Oxford together, I hadn’t wanted to take any chances; so I had told her to make an effort to fascinate the old boy.

“You told me it would please him particularly if I asked him to read me some of his history of the family.” “Wasn’t he pleased?” " He was delighted. He finished writing the thing yesterday afternoon and read me nearly all of it last night. I have never had such a shock in my life. The book is an outrage. It is impossible. It is horrible 1” “But dash it, the family weren’t so bad as all that.” “It is not a history of the family at all. Your uncle has written his reminiscences 1 He calls them ‘Recollections of a Long Life!”

I began to understand. As I say, Uncle Willoughby had been somewhat on the tabasco side as a young man, and it began to look as if he might have turned out something pretty fruity if he had started recollecting his long life.

" If half of what he has written is true,” said Florence, " your uncle’s youth must have been perfectly appalling. The moment we began to read he plunged straight into a most scandalous story of how he and my father were thrown out of a music-hall in 1887!” “Why?” " I decline to tell you why.” It must have been something pretty bad. It took a lot to make them chuck people out of music-halls in 1887.

" Your uncle specifically states that father had drunk a quart and a half of champagne before begin­ ning the evening,” she went on. “The book is full of stories like that. There is a dreadful one about Lord Emsworth.” “Lord Emsworth? Not the one we know? Not the one at Blandings?”