Page:Uneasy money by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.djvu/18

  Uneasy Money Some men in the circumstances in which Lord Daw- lish found himself would have fidgeted and looked at their watches ; some would have prowled up and down ; others might have sought solace at the excellent bar which the management of the Bandolero maintains for just such emergencies. Lord Dawlish preferred men- tal golf. As he stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individual of disheveled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar studs, shoe laces, rubber rings, buttonhooks and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been eying his lord- ship appraisingly from the edge of the curb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in the immediate vicinity, he anchored himself in front of him and observed that he had a wife and four chil- dren at home, all starving. This sort of thing was always happening to Lord Dawlish. There was something about him, some at- mosphere of unaffected kindliness, that invited it. To* tal strangers who had made imprudent marriages with- out asking his advice were forever stopping him in the street and expecting him to finance the ventures. They did it generally with a touch of reproach in their voices, as if they felt a little wounded that he had not done something about it before. Digitized by VjOOQ IC