MICHAELSPAPPY

 "You know Miss Peavey's work, of course?" said Lady Constance, smiling pleasantly on her two celebrities.

"Who does not?" said Psmith courteously.

"Oh do you?" said Miss Peavey, gratification causing her slender body to perform a sort of ladylike shimmy down its whole length. "I scarcely hoped that you would know my name. My Canadian sales have not been large."

"Quite large enough," said Psmith. "I mean, of course," he added with a paternal smile, "that, while your delicate art may not have a universal appeal in a young country, it is intensely appreciated by a small and select body of the intelligentsia."

And if that was not the stuff to give them, he reflected with not a little complacency, he was dashed.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

 Miss Peavy often had this effect on the less soulful type of man, especially in the mornings, when such men are not at their strongest and best. When she came into the breakfast-room of a country house, brave men who had been up a bit late the night before quailed and tried to hide behind newspapers. She was the sort of woman who tells a man who is propping his eyes open with his fingers and endeavouring to correct a headache with strong tea, that she was up at six watching the dew fade off the grass, and didn't he think that those wisps of morning mist were the elves' bridal-veils. She had large, fine, melancholy eyes, and was apt to droop dreamily.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

 "Even if the little enterprise meets with disaster, the reflection that I did my best for the young couple will be a great consolation to me when I am serving my bit of time in Wormwood Scrubbs. It will cheer me up. The jailers will cluster outside the door to listen to me singing in my cell. My pet rat, as he creeps out to share the crumbs of my breakfast, will wonder why I whistle as I pick the morning's oakum. I shall join in the hymns on Sundays in a way that will electrify the chaplain. That is to say, if anything goes wrong and I am what I believe is technically termed 'copped.' I say 'if,'" said Psmith, gazing solemnly at his companion. "But I do not intend to be copped. I have never gone in largely for crime hitherto, but something tells me I shall be rather good at it. I look forward confidently to making a nice, clean job of the thing. And now, Comrade Threepwood, I must ask you to excuse me while I get the half-nelson on this rather poisonous poetry of good old McTodd's.

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

For the uninformed, Wormwood Scrubbs is a prison London for adult males. Oakum is a preparation of tarred fibers used in shipbuilding.

 "You'll do it?"

"I will."

"Of course," said Freddie awkwardly, "I'll see that you get a bit all right. I mean . . . ."

Psmith waved his hand deprecatingly. "My dear comrade Threepwood, let us not become sordid on this glad occasion. As far as I am concerned, there will be no charge."

"What! But look here . . . ."

"Any assistance I can give will be offered in a purely amateur spirit. I would have mentioned before, only I was reluctant to interrupt you, that Comrade Jackson is my boyhood chum, and that Phyllis, his wife, injects into my life the few beams of sunshine that illumine the dreary round. I have long desired to do something to ameliorate their lot, and now that the chance has come I am delighted. It is true that I am not a man of affluence - my bank manager, I am told, winces in a rather painful manner whenever my name is mentioned - but I am not so reduced that I must charge a fee for performing, on behalf of a pal, a simple act of courtesy like pinching a twenty thousand pound necklace."

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

 "I suppose you get ideas for your poetry from all sorts of things," said Lord Emsworth, nobly resisting the temptation to collar the conversation again. He was feeling extremely friendly towards this poet fellow. It was deuced civil of him not to be put out and huffy at being left alone in the smoking-room.

 "From practically everything," said Psmith, "except fish."

"Fish?"

"I have never written a poem about fish."

"No?" said Lord Emsworth, again feeling that a pin had worked loose in the machinery of the conversation.

"I was once offered a princely sum," went on Psmith, now floating happily along on the tide of his native exuberance, "to write a ballad for the Fishmonger's Gazette entitled 'Herbert the Turbot.' But I was firm. I declined."

"Indeed?" said Lord Emsworth.

"One has one's self-respect," said Psmith.

"Oh, decidedly," said Lord Emsworth.

"It was painful, of course. The editor broke down completely when he realized that my refusal was final. However, I sent him on with a letter of introduction to John Drinkwater, who, I believe, turned him out quite a good little effort on the theme."

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

 "I asked you to wear a pink chrysanthemum. So I could recognize you, you know."

"I am wearing a pink chrysanthemum. I should have imagined that that was a fact that the most casual could hardly have overlooked."

"That thing?" The other gazed disparagingly at the floral decoration. "I thought it was some kind of cabbage. I meant one of those little what-d'you-may-call-its that people do wear in their button-holes."

"Carnation, possibly?"

"Carnation! That's right."

Psmith removed the chrysanthemum and dropped it behind his chair. He looked at his companion reproachfully.

"If you had studied botany at school, comrade," he said, "much misery might have been averted. I cannot begin to tell you the spiritual agony I suffered, trailing through the metropolis behind that shrub."

(from Leave It To Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

 "But my uncle and I are about to part company. From now on he, so to speak, will take the high road and I'll take the low road. I dine with him tonight, and over the nuts and wine, I shall hand him the bad news that I propose to resign my position in the firm. I have no doubt that he supposed he was doing me a grand turn by starting me in his fish business, but even what little experience I have had of it has convinced me that it is not my proper sphere. The whisper flies round the clubs, 'Psmith has not found his niche.'"

(from Enter Psmith, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)