Something New, P. G. Wodehouse [best desktop ebook reader .TXT] 📗

manner toward him. During the brief conversation when he had told her of his having secured his present situation, and later, only a few minutes back, on the platform of Paddington Station, he had sensed a coldness, a certain hostility⁠—so different from her pleasant friendliness at their first meeting.

She had returned now to her earlier manner and he was surprised at the difference it made. He felt somehow younger, more alive. The lilt of the train’s rattle changed to a gay ragtime. This was curious, because Joan was nothing more than a friend. He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted⁠—yes; but one does not fall in love.

A moment’s reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species.

“Well, what do you think of it all, Mr. Marson?” said Joan. “Are you sorry or glad that you let me persuade you to do this perfectly mad thing? I feel responsible for you, you know. If it had not been for me you would have been comfortably in Arundell Street, writing your Wand of Death.”

“I’m glad.”

“You don’t feel any misgivings now that you are actually committed to domestic service?”

“Not one.”

Joan, against her will, smiled approval on this uncompromising attitude. This young man might be her rival, but his demeanor on the eve of perilous times appealed to her. That was the spirit she liked and admired⁠—that reckless acceptance of whatever might come. It was the spirit in which she herself had gone into the affair and she was pleased to find that it animated Ashe also⁠—though, to be sure, it had its drawbacks. It made his rivalry the more dangerous. This reflection injected a touch of the old hostility into her manner.

“I wonder whether you will continue to feel so brave.”

“What do you mean?”

Joan perceived that she was in danger of going too far. She had no wish to unmask Ashe at the expense of revealing her own secret. She must resist the temptation to hint that she had discovered his.

“I meant,” she said quickly, “that from what I have seen of him Mr. Peters seems likely to be a rather trying man to work for.”

Ashe’s face cleared. For a moment he had almost suspected that she had guessed his errand.

“Yes. I imagine he will be. He is what you might call quick-tempered. He has dyspepsia, you know.”

“I know.”

“What he wants is plenty of fresh air and no cigars, and a regular course of those Larsen Exercises that amused you so much.”

Joan laughed.

“Are you going to try and persuade Mr. Peters to twist himself about like that? Do let me see it if you do.”

“I wish I could.”

“Do suggest it to him.”

“Don’t you think he would resent it from a valet?”

“I keep forgetting that you are a valet. You look so unlike one.”

“Old Peters didn’t think so. He rather complimented me on my appearance. He said I was ordinary-looking.”

“I shouldn’t have called you that. You look so very strong and fit.”

“Surely there are muscular valets?”

“Well, yes; I suppose there are.”

Ashe looked at her. He was thinking that never in his life had he seen a girl so amazingly pretty. What it was that she had done to herself was beyond him; but something, some trick of dress, had given her a touch of the demure that made her irresistible. She was dressed in sober black, the ideal background for her fairness.

“While on the subject,” he said, “I suppose you know you don’t look in the least like a lady’s maid? You look like a disguised princess.”

She laughed.

“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Marson, but you’re quite wrong. Anyone could tell I was a lady’s maid, a mile away. You aren’t criticizing the dress, surely?”

“The dress is all right. It’s the general effect. I don’t think your expression is right. It’s⁠—it’s⁠—there’s too much attack in it. You aren’t meek enough.”

Joan’s eyes opened wide.

“Meek! Have you ever seen an English lady’s maid, Mr. Marson?”

“Why, no; now that I come to think of it, I don’t believe I have.”

“Well, let me tell you that meekness is her last quality. Why should she be meek? Doesn’t she go in after the groom of the chambers?”

“Go in? Go in where?”

“In to dinner.” She smiled at the sight of his bewildered face. “I’m afraid you don’t know much about the etiquette of the new world you have entered so rashly. Didn’t you know that the rules of precedence among the servants of a big house in England are more rigid and complicated than in English society?”

“You’re joking!”

“I’m not joking. You try going in to dinner out of your proper place when we get to Blandings and see what happens. A public rebuke from the butler is the least you could expect.”

A bead of perspiration appeared on Ashe’s forehead.

“Heavens!” he whispered. “If a butler publicly rebuked me I think I should commit suicide. I couldn’t survive it.”

He stared, with fallen jaw, into the abyss of horror into which he had leaped so lightheartedly. The servant problem, on this large scale, had been nonexistent for him until now. In the days of his youth, at Mayling, Massachusetts, his needs had been ministered to by a muscular Swede. Later, at Oxford, there had been his “scout” and his bed maker, harmless persons both, provided you locked up your whisky. And in London, his last phase, a succession of servitors of the type of the disheveled maid at Number Seven had tended him.

That, dotted about the land of his adoption, there were houses in which larger staffs of domestics were maintained, he had been vaguely aware. Indeed, in Gridley Quayle, Investigator; The Adventure of the Missing Marquis⁠—number four of the series⁠—he had drawn a picture of the home life of a duke, in which a butler and