diminishing birth rate, the growing materialism of the age, a
score of similar subjects.

Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentieth-century specialty.
Lord Emsworth never worried. Nature had equipped him with a mind
so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeableness of
life that if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out
again a moment later. Except for a few of life's fundamental
facts, such as that his check book was in the right-hand top
drawer of his desk; that the Honorable Freddie Threepwood was a
young idiot who required perpetual restraint; and that when in
doubt about anything he had merely to apply to his secretary,
Rupert Baxter--except for these basic things, he never remembered
anything for more than a few minutes.

At Eton, in the sixties, they had called him Fathead.

His was a life that lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which
raise man to the level of the gods; but undeniably it was an
extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition
fulfilled; but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of
ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live
forever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying
about this by the fact that he had no desire to live forever in
England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented as a human
being could be in this century of alarms and excursions.

Indeed, as he bowled along in his cab and reflected that a really
charming girl, not in the chorus of any West End theater, a girl
with plenty of money and excellent breeding, had--in a moment,