Cosmo Wisdom's headache

   The effect of Lord Ickenham's brief resume of the position of affairs on Cosmo was to cause him to start convulsively. And as anything in the nature of a convulsive start makes a man who has recently been struck on the head by a woman's gentle cosh feel as if that head had a red-hot skewer thrust through it, he uttered a yelp of agony, like a Volga boatman stung by a wasp.
     "I know, I know," said Lord Ickenham, nodding sympathetically. 'The aftereffects of being bust one do linger, don't they? As a young man, in the course of a political argument in a Third Avenue saloon in New York, I was once struck squarely on the topknot by a pewter tankard in the capable hands of a gentleman by the name of Moriarty - no relation of the Professor's, I believe - and it was days before I was my old bright self again.

(from Cocktail Time, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)