Perhape one too many?

    "Oh, hallo, Aunt Daphne," he said. "Where are you off to?"

    "I am going to bed. I have a headache. Why are you so late, Esmond?"

    "Well, if you ask me," said Esmond cheerily, "I'd say it was because I didn't arrive sooner."

    "Colonel and Mrs. Kegley-Bassington were most surprised. They could not understand why you were not here."

    Esmond uttered a ringing laugh. "Then they must be the most priceless fatheads," he said. "You'd think a child would have realized that the solution was that I was somewhere else."

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

    

It doesn't take a brain surgeon

 Police constables are not built for speed. Where you catch them at their best is standing on street corners saying, "Pass along there." But, as I was stressing a moment ago, Augustus Fink-Nottle, in addition to being a flat racer of marked ability, was also a fathead, and now, when he had victory in his grasp, the fatheaded streak in him came uppermost. There was a tree standing at the roadside and, suddenly swerving off the course, he made for it and hoisted himself into its branches. And what he supposed that was going to get him, only his diseased mind knew. Ernest Dobbs may not have been one of Hampshire's brightest thinkers, but he was smart enough to stand under a tree.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Frogs?!

     I goggled. "Doing what?"

    "Strewing frogs. In Constable Dobbs's boudoir. The Vicar suggested it."

    "The Vicar?"

    "I mean it was he who gave Corky the idea. She had been brooding a lot, poor girl, on Dobbs's high-handed behaviour in connection with her dog, and last night the Vicar happened to speak of Pharaoh and all those Plagues he got when he wouldn't let the Children of Israel go. You probably recall the incident? His words started a train of thought. It occurred to Corky that if Dobbs were visited by a Plague of Frogs, it might quite possibly change his heart and make him let Sam Goldwyn go. So she asked me to look in at his cottage and attend to the matter. She said it would please her and be good for Dobbs and would only take a few minutes of my time. She felt that the Plague of Lice might be even more effective, but she is a practical, clear-thinking girl and realized that lice are had to come by, whereas you can find frogs in any hedgerow."

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

    

Short, but sturdy

 The sleepless guardian of the peace of King's Deverill was one of those chunky, nobbly officers. It was as though Nature, setting out to assemble him, had said to herself, "I will not skimp." Nor had she done so, except possibly in the matter of height. I believe that in order to become a member of the Force you have to stand five feet nine inches in your socks, and Ernest Dobbs can only just have got his nose under the wire. But this slight perpendicular shortage had the effect of rendering his bulk all the more impressive. He was plainly a man who, had he felt disposed, could have understudied the village blacksmith and no questions asked, for it could be seen at a glance that the muscles of his brawny arms were strong as iron bands.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Step aside, brother

 "H'm!" he said. "This will want a little management."

"Yes," I concurred.

"It calls for sophisticated handling. We shall have to think this over."

"I've been thinking it over for hours."

"Yes, but you've got one of those cheap substitute brains which are never any good. It will be different when a man like me starts giving it the cream of his intellect."

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

There are poets, and then there are poets

 It would not have surprised you to learn that Esmond Haddock was the author of sonnet sequences of a fruity and emotional nature which had made him the toast of Bloomsbury, for his air was that of a man who could rhyme "love" and "dove" as well as the next chap. Nor would you have been astonished if informed that he had recently felled an ox with a single blow. You would simply have felt what an ass the ox must have been to get into an argument with a fellow with a chest like that.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Just call me Bertie

       "Let Madeline Bassett become hep to what has occurred and there can be but one result. Gussie will get the bum's rush, and the bowed figure you will see shambling down the aisle at her side, while the customers reach for their hats and the organ plays 'The Voice That Breathed O'er Eden' will be that of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster."

    "I didn't know your name was Wilberforce."

    I explained that except in moments of great emotion one hushed it up.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

It tends not to promote romance

There had been moments when it had been touch and go, notably on the occasion when Gussie got lit up like a candelabra and in that condition presented the prizes to the young scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School. She had scratched his nomination then, though subsequently relenting, and it could not but be that she could scratch it again, should she discover that the man on whom she looked as a purer, loftier spirit than other men had received an exemplary sentence for wading in the Trafalgar Square fountain. Nothing puts an idealistic girl off a fellow more than the news that he is doing fourteen days in the jug.

(from The Mating Season, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)