Цитаты из книги автора P. G. Wodehouse The Inimitable Jeeves

After breakfast I lit a cigarette and went to the open window to inspect the day

Not for me?'
'Not for a dozen more like you.'
'I never thought,' said Bingo sorrowfully, 'to hear those words from Bertie Wooster!'
'Well, you've heard them now,' I said. 'Paste them in your hat.'
'Bertie, we were at school together.'
'It wasn't my fault.'
'We've been pals for fifteen years.'
'I know. It's going to take me the rest of my life to live it down.'

You must conserve your energies, old friend. Sit down here in the shade.'

'Don't want to sit down.'

'Well, take it easy, anyhow.'

The kid flitted to another topic like a butterfly hovering from flower to flower.

At last, just as I was beginning to feel that it was going on for ever, the thing finished.

There was a pause. And then - well, it was a wrench, but I did it. I unstripped the cummerbund and handed it over.

'Do you wish me to press this, sir?'

I gave the thing one last, longing look. It had been very dear to me.

'No,' I said, 'take it away; give it to the deserving poor - I shall never wear it again.'

'Thank you very much, sir,' said Jeeves.

'I don't want to rub it in, Aunt Agatha,' I said coldly, 'but I should just like to point out before I go that the girl who stole your pearls is the girl you've been hounding me on to marry ever since I got here. Good heavens! Do you realize that if you had brought the thing off I should probably have had children who would have sneaked my watch while I was dandling them on my knee?

And more to the same effect, all good, ripe stuff. And presently having said his say he withdrew, taking the chambermaid with him, the latter with a crisp tenner clutched in a vice-like grip. I suppose she and the bandit split it outside. A French hotel manager wouldn't be likely to let real money wander away from him without counting himself in on the division.

I don't know when I've had a more juicy moment. It was one of those occasions about which I shall prattle to my grandchildren - if I ever have any, which at the moment of going to press seems more or less of a hundred-to-one shot. Aunt Agatha simply deflated before my eyes. It reminded me of when I once saw some chappies letting the gas out of a balloon

I remember - it must have been when I was at school because I don't go in for that sort of thing very largely nowadays - reading a poem or something about something or other in which there was a line which went, if I've got it rightly, 'Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.' Well, what I'm driving at is that during the next two weeks that's exactly how it was with me. I mean to say, I could hear the wedding bells chiming faintly in the distance and getting louder and louder every day, and how the deuce to slide out of it was more than I could think. Jeeves, no doubt, could have dug up a dozen brainy schemes in a couple of minutes, but he was still aloof and chilly and I couldn't bring myself to ask him point-blank. I mean, he could see easily enough that the young master was in a bad way and, if that wasn't enough to make him overlook the fact that I was still gleaming brightly about the waistband, well, what it amounted to was that the old feudal spirit was dead in the blighter's bosom and there was nothing to be done about it.

'No, sir.'

The blighter's manner was so cold and unchummy that I bit the bullet and had a dash at being airy.

'Oh, well, tra-la-la!' I said.

'Precisely^ sir,' said Jeeves.

And that was, so to speak, that.