The Coming of Bill. P. G. Wodehouse

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       P. G. Wodehouse

      The Coming of Bill

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664646903

Table of Contents

       Chapter I — A Pawn of Fate

       Chapter II — Ruth States Her Intentions

       Chapter III — The Mates Meet

       Chapter IV — Troubled Waters

       Chapter V — Wherein Opposites Agree

       Chapter VI — Breaking the News

       Chapter VII — Sufficient Unto Themselves

       Chapter VIII — Suspense

       Chapter IX — The White Hope is Turned Down

       Chapter X — An Interlude of Peace

       Chapter XI — Stung to Action

       Chapter XII — A ClimaX —

       BOOK TWO

       Chapter I — Empty-handed

       Chapter II — An Unknown Path

       Chapter III — The Misadventure of Steve

       Chapter IV — The Widening Gap

       Chapter V — The Real Thing

       Chapter VI — The Outcasts

       Chapter VII — Cutting the Tangled Knot

       Chapter VIII — Steve to the Rescue

       Chapter IX — At One in the Morning

       Chapter X — Accepting the Gifts of the Gods

       Chapter XI — Mr. Penway on the Grill

       Chapter XII — Dolls with Souls

       Chapter XIII — Pastures New

       Chapter XIV — The Sixty-First Street Cyclone

       Chapter XV — Mrs. Porter's Waterloo

       Chapter XVI — The White-Hope Link

Chapter I—A Pawn of Fate

       Table of Contents

      Mrs. Lora Delane Porter dismissed the hireling who had brought her automobile around from the garage and seated herself at the wheel. It was her habit to refresh her mind and improve her health by a daily drive between the hours of two and four in the afternoon.

      The world knows little of its greatest women, and it is possible that Mrs. Porter's name is not familiar to you. If this is the case, I am pained, but not surprised. It happens only too often that the uplifter of the public mind is baulked by a disinclination on the part of the public mind to meet him or her half-way. The uplifter does his share. He produces the uplifting book. But the public, instead of standing still to be uplifted, wanders off to browse on coloured supplements and magazine stories.

      If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond recall.

      Mrs. Porter's mind worked backward and forward. She had one eye on the past, the other on the future. If she was strong on heredity, she was stronger on the future of the race. Most of her published works dealt with this subject. A careful perusal of them would have enabled the rising generation to select its ideal wife or husband with perfect ease, and, in the event of Heaven blessing the union, her little volume, entitled "The Hygienic Care of the Baby," which was all about germs and how to avoid them, would have insured the continuance of the direct succession.

      Unfortunately, the rising generation did not seem disposed to a careful perusal of anything except the baseball scores and the beauty hints in the Sunday papers, and Mrs. Porter's public was small. In fact, her only real disciple, as she sometimes told herself in her rare moods of discouragement, was her niece, Ruth Bannister, daughter of John Bannister, the millionaire. It was not so long ago, she reflected with pride, that she had induced Ruth to refuse to marry Basil Milbank—a considerable feat, he being a young man of remarkable personal attractions and a great match in every way. Mrs. Porter's objection to him was that his father had died believing to the last that he was a teapot.

      There is nothing evil or degrading in believing oneself a teapot, but it argues a certain inaccuracy of the thought processes; and Mrs. Porter had used all her influence with Ruth to make her reject Basil. It was her success that first showed her how great that influence was. She had come now to look on Ruth's destiny as something for which she was personally responsible—a fact which was noted and resented by others, in particular Ruth's brother Bailey, who regarded his aunt with