“Yes, sir. Spenser informed me that she had expressed some such intention. Mrs. Gregson wishes you to call upon her immediately, sir.” “She does, eh? What do you advise, Jeeves?” “I think a trip abroad might prove enjoyable, sir.” I shook my head. “She’d come after me.” “Not if you went far enough afield, sir. There are excellent boats leaving every Wednesday and Saturday for New York.” “Jeeves,” I said, “you are right, as always. Book the tickets.” CHAPTER IX A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION You know, the longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the trouble in this bally world is caused by the light-hearted and thoughtless way in which chappies dash off letters of introduction and hand them to other chappies to deliver to chappies of the third part. It’s one of those things that make you wish you were living in the Stone Age. What I mean to say is, if a fellow in those days wanted to give anyone a letter of introduction, he had to spend a month or so carving it on a large-sized boulder, and the chances were that the other chappie got so sick of lugging the thing round in the hot sun that he dropped it after the first mile. But nowadays it’s so easy to write letters of introduction that everybody does it without a second thought, with the result that some perfectly harmless cove like myself gets in the soup. Mark you, all the above is what you might call the result of my riper experience. I don’t mind admitting that in the first flush of the thing, so, to speak, when Jeeves told me—this would be about three weeks after I’d landed in America—that a blighter called Cyril Bassington-Bassington had arrived and I found that he had brought a letter of introduction to me from Aunt Agatha ... where was I? Oh, yes ... I don’t mind admitting, I was saying, that just at first I was rather bucked. You see, after the painful events which had resulted in my leaving England I hadn’t expected to get any sort of letter from Aunt Agatha which would pass the censor, so to speak. And it was a pleasant surprise to open this one and find it almost civil. Chilly, perhaps, in parts, but on the whole quite tolerably polite. I looked on the thing as a hopeful sign. Sort of olive-branch, you know. Or do I
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