dinners, what?”

“I fancy that should be entirely adequate, sir.”

“This is the jolliest thing that’s happened since we left England. It looks to me as if the sun were breaking through the clouds.”

“Very possibly, sir.”

He started to put out my things, and there was an awkward sort of silence.

“Not those socks, Jeeves,” I said, gulping a bit but having a dash at the careless, off-hand tone. “Give me the purple ones.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Those jolly purple ones.”

“Very good, sir.”

He lugged them out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of the salad. You could see he was feeling deeply. Deuced painful and all that, this sort of thing, but a chappie has got to assert himself every now and then. Absolutely.

*    *    *    *    *

I was looking for Cyril to show up again any time after breakfast, but he didn’t appear: so towards one o’clock I trickled out to the Lambs Club, where I had an appointment to feed the Wooster face with a cove of the name of Caffyn I’d got pally with since my arrival—George Caffyn, a fellow who wrote plays and what not. I’d made a lot of friends during my stay in New York, the city being crammed with bonhomous lads who one and all extended a welcoming hand to the stranger in their midst.

Caffyn was a bit late, but bobbed up finally, saying that he had been kept at a rehearsal of his new musical comedy, “Ask Dad”; and we started in. We had just reached the coffee, when the waiter came up and said that Jeeves wanted to see me.

Jeeves was in the waiting-room. He gave the socks one pained look as I came in, then averted his eyes.

“Mr. Bassington-Bassington has just telephoned, sir.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, sir.”

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