"Пэлем Грэнвил Вудхауз. Much obliged, Jeeves (Премного обязан, Дживс; англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

with whom I had plucked the gowans fine at prep school, public
school and University, but definitely ancient. Our rooms at Oxford
had been adjacent, and it would not be too much to say that from
the moment he looked in to borrow a syphon of soda water we became
more like brothers than anything, and this state of things had
continued after we had both left the seat of learning.

For quite a while he had been a prominent member of the Drones
Club, widely known for his effervescence and vivacity, but all of a
sudden he had tendered his resignation and gone to live in the
country, oddly enough at Steeple Bumpleigh in Essex, where my Aunt
Agatha has her lair. This, somebody told me, was due to the
circumstance that he had got engaged to a girl of strong character
who disapproved of the Drones Club. You get girls like that every
now and then, and in my opinion they are best avoided.
Well, naturally this had parted us. He never came to London,
and I of course never went to Steeple Bumpleigh. You don't catch me
going anywhere near Aunt Agatha unless I have to. No sense in
sticking one's neck out. But I had missed him sorely. Oh for the
touch of a vanished hand, is how you might put it.
Arriving at Barribault's, I found him in the lobby where you
have the pre-luncheon gargle before proceeding to the grill-room,
and after the initial What-ho-ing and What-a-time-since-we-met-ing
inevitable when two vanished hands who haven't seen each other for
ages re-establish contact, he asked me if I would like one for the
tonsils.
'I won't join you,' he said. 'I'm not actually on the waggon, I
have a little light wine at dinner now and then, but my fiancee
wants me to stay off cocktails. She says they harden the arteries.'
If you are about to ask me if this didn't make me purse the
lips a bit, I can assure you that it did. It seemed to point to his
having gone and got hitched up with a popsy totally lacking in the
proper spirit, and it bore out what I had been told about her being
a girl of strong character. No one who wasn't could have dashed the
cup from his lips in this manner. She had apparently made him like
it, too, for he had spoken of her not with the sullen bitterness of
one crushed beneath the iron heel but with devotion in every
syllable. Plainly he had got it up his nose and didn't object to
being bossed.
How different from me, I reflected, that time when I was
engaged to my Uncle Percy's bossy daughter Florence Craye. It
didn't last long, because she gave me the heave-ho and got
betrothed to a fellow called Gorringe who wrote vers libre, but
while it lasted I felt like one of those Ethiopian slaves Cleopatra
used to push around, and I chafed more than somewhat. Whereas
Ginger obviously hadn't even started to chafe. It isn't difficult
to spot when a fellow's chafing, and I could detect none of the
symptoms. He seemed to think that putting the presidential veto on
cocktails showed what an angel of mercy the girl was, always
working with his good at heart.