Nothing like tennis to break up an engagement

          "Did you kick him?"

          "Of course I didn't kick him. I loved him like a brother."

         "The chance of a lifetime thrown away," said Miss Salt with bitterness. "If Orlo Vosper in his formative years had been thoroughly kicked twice a day, Sundays included, he might not have grown up the overbearing louse he has become."

          "Would you call him an overbearing louse?"

          "I did. To his face"

          "When was this?"

          "On the tennis court at Eastbourne, and again when entering the club house. I'd have done it in the dressing-room, too, only he wasn't there. They separate the sexes. 'Of all the overbearing lice that ever overbore,' I told him, 'you are the undisputed champion,' and I gave him back his ring."

          "Oh, you were engaged?"

          "Don't rub it in. We all make mistakes."

          "I didn't see anything about it in the papers."

          "We were going to announce it just before Wimbledon."

          "What did he do to incur your displeasure?"

          "I'll tell you. We were playing in the mixed doubles and I admit that I may have been slightly off my game, but that was no reason why, after we had dropped the first set, he should have started barging into my half of the court, taking my shots for me as if I were some elderly aunt with arthritis in both legs who had learned tennis in the previous week at a correspondence school."

(from Pigs Have Wings, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)