pleasant surprise to open this one and find it almost civil. Chilly,
perhaps, in parts, but on the whole quite tolerably polite. I looked on
the thing as a hopeful sign. Sort of olive-branch, you know. Or do I
mean orange blossom? What I'm getting at is that the fact that Aunt
Agatha was writing to me without calling me names seemed, more or less,
like a step in the direction of peace.

And I was all for peace, and that right speedily. I'm not saying a word
against New York, mind you. I liked the place, and was having quite a
ripe time there. But the fact remains that a fellow who's been used to
London all his life does get a trifle homesick on a foreign strand, and
I wanted to pop back to the cosy old flat in Berkeley Street--which
could only be done when Aunt Agatha had simmered down and got over the
Glossop episode. I know that London is a biggish city, but, believe me,
it isn't half big enough for any fellow to live in with Aunt Agatha
when she's after him with the old hatchet. And so I'm bound to say I
looked on this chump Bassington-Bassington, when he arrived, more or
less as a Dove of Peace, and was all for him.

He would seem from contemporary accounts to have blown in one morning
at seven-forty-five, that being the ghastly sort of hour they shoot you
off the liner in New York. He was given the respectful raspberry by
Jeeves, and told to try again about three hours later, when there would
be a sporting chance of my having sprung from my bed with a glad cry to
welcome another day and all that sort of thing. Which was rather decent
of Jeeves, by the way, for it so happened that there was a slight
estrangement, a touch of coldness, a bit of a row in other words,
between us at the moment because of some rather priceless purple socks
which I was wearing against his wishes: and a lesser man might easily
have snatched at the chance of getting back at me a bit by loosing