Right Ho, Jeeves

“Yes, madam, Mr. Wooster would perform the task admirably. He is an expert cyclist. He has often boasted to me of his triumphs on the wheel.” I hadn’t. I hadn’t done anything of the sort. It’s simply monstrous how one’s words get twisted. All I had ever done was to mention to him--casually, just as an interesting item of information, one day in New York when we were watching the six-day bicycle race--that at the age of fourteen, while spending my holidays with a vicar of sorts who had been told off to teach me Latin, I had won the Choir Boys’ Handicap at the local school treat. A different thing from boasting of one’s triumphs on the wheel. I mean, he was a man of the world and must have known that the form of school treats is never of the hottest. And, if I’m not mistaken, I had specifically told him that on the occasion referred to I had received half a lap start and that Willie Punting, the odds-on favourite to whom the race was expected to be a gift, had been forced to retire, owing to having pinched his elder brother’s machine without asking the elder brother, and the elder brother coming along just as the pistol went and giving him one on the side of the head and taking it away from him, thus rendering him a scratched-at-the-post non-starter. Yet, from the way he talked, you would have thought I was one of those chaps in sweaters with medals all over them, whose photographs bob up from time to time in the illustrated press on the occasion of their having ridden from Hyde Park Corner to Glasgow in three seconds under the hour, or whatever it is.