why, then, Jeeves, hope begins to dawn a bit. He's just the sort of chap
a girl like Madeline Bassett might scoop in with relish."

This Bassett, I must explain, had been a fellow visitor of ours at
Cannes; and as she and Angela had struck up one of those effervescent
friendships which girls do strike up, I had seen quite a bit of her.
Indeed, in my moodier moments it sometimes seemed to me that I could not
move a step without stubbing my toe 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,