fairly tall and fairly broad, and he had the most enormous head, with practically no hair on it, which made it seem bigger and much more like the dome of St. Paul’s. I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much.

“What ho! What ho! What ho!” I said, trying to strike the genial note, and then had a sudden feeling that that was just the sort of thing I had been warned not to say. Dashed difficult it is to start things going properly on an occasion like this. A fellow living in a London flat is so handicapped. I mean to say, if I had been the young squire greeting the visitor in the country, I could have said, “Welcome to Meadowsweet Hall!” or something zippy like that. It sounds silly to say “Welcome to Number 6A, Crichton Mansions, Berkeley Street, W.”

A

“I am afraid I am a little late,” he said, as we sat down. “I was detained at my club by Lord Alastair Hungerford, the Duke of Ramfurline’s son. His Grace, he informed me, had exhibited a renewal of the symptoms which have been causing the family so much concern. I could not leave him immediately. Hence my unpunctuality, which I trust has not discommoded you.”

“Oh, not at all. So the Duke is off his rocker, what?”

“The expression which you use is not precisely the one I should have employed myself with reference to the head of perhaps the noblest family in England, but there is no doubt that cerebral excitement does, as you suggest, exist in no small degree.” He sighed as well as he could with his mouth full of cutlet. “A profession like mine is a great strain, a great strain.”

“Must be.”

“Sometimes I am appalled at what I see around me.” He stopped suddenly and sort of stiffened. “Do you keep a cat, Mr. Wooster?”

“Eh? What? Cat? No, no cat.”

“I was conscious of a distinct impression that I had heard a cat mewing either in the room or very near to where we are sitting.”

“Probably a taxi or something in the street.”

“I fear I do not follow you.”

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