oe on the woman.

And what made it all so painful and distressing was that the more we met,
the less did I seem able to find to say to her.

You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right
out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality
that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to
cauliflower. It was like that with this Bassett and me; so much so that I
have known occasions when for minutes at a stretch Bertram Wooster might
have been observed fumbling with the tie, shuffling the feet, and
behaving in all other respects in her presence like the complete dumb
brick. When, therefore, she took her departure some two weeks before we
did, you may readily imagine that, in Bertram's opinion, it was not a day
too soon.

It was not her beauty, mark you, that thus numbed me. She was a pretty
enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but not the sort of
breath-taker that takes the breath.

No, what caused this disintegration in a usually fairly fluent prattler
with the sex was her whole mental attitude. I don't want to wrong
anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry,
but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite
the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks
you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are
God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

As regards the fusing of her soul and mine, therefore, there was nothing
doing. But with Gussie, the posish was entirely different. The thing that
had stymied me--viz. that this girl was obviously all loaded down with
ideals and sentiment and what not--was quite in order as far as he was
concerned.

Gussie had always been one of those dreamy, soulful birds--you can't shut
yourself up in the country and live only for newts, if you're not--and I
could see no reason why, if he could somehow be induced to get the low,
burning words off his chest, he and the Bassett shouldn't hit it off like
ham and eggs.

"She's just the type for him," I said.

"I am most gratified to hear it, sir."

"And he's just the type for her. In fine, a good thing and one to be
pushed along with the utmost energy. Strain every nerve, Jeeves."

"Very good, sir," replied the honest fellow. "I will attend to the matter
at once."

Now up to this point, as you will doubtless agree, what you might call a
perfect harmony had pre