A Few Quick Ones by P. G. Wodehouse

his is a Grade A mascot, and he feels that the club should have the benefit of his services. Having heard his story, I agree with him. This half-portion's knack of doing the right thing at the right time is uncanny. I believe the child is almost human."
    His eloquence was not without its effect. But though some of the malcontents wavered, the Egg remained firm.
    "That's all very well, but the question that presents itself is - Where will this stop? What guarantee have we that if we elect this juvenile, Bingo won't start trying to ring in his old nurse or his Uncle Wilberforce, or the proprietor of that children's paper he's editor of - what's his name - Purkiss?"
    "I don't know about the nurse or his Uncle Wilberforce," said the Crumpet, "but you need have no anxiety concerning Henry Cuthbert Purkiss. Bingo's relations with his overlord are at the moment formal, even distant. Owing to Purkiss, he recently had to undergo a mental strain almost without parallel in his experience. And though, thanks to this beneficent baby's faultless sense of timing, he was enabled to emerge from the soup which was lashing angrily about his ankles, he finds it difficult to forgive. He expressly stated to me that if Henry Cuthbert Purkiss were to step on a banana skin. and strain a ligament, it would be all right with him."
    "What did Purkiss do?"
    "It was what he didn't do. He refused to pay ten quid for Bingo's story, and this at a crisis in Bingo's affairs when only ten quid could save him from the fate that is worse than death - viz. having the wife of his bosom draw in her breath sharply and look squiggle-eyed at him. He had been relying on Purkiss to do the square thing, and Purkiss let him down."
     
    Here briefly (said the Crumpet) are the facts. As most of you are probably aware, Bingo buzzed off a couple of years ago and went and married the eminent female novelist Rosie M. Banks, authoress of Only A Factory Girl, Mervyn Keene, Clubman, ' Twas Once in May and other stearine works of fiction, and came a day when there burst on the London scene a bouncing baby of the name of Algernon Aubrey. Very pleasant for all concerned, of course, but the catch is that this sort of thing puts ideas in the heads of female novelists. As they sat at dinner one night, Mrs. Bingo looked up from her portion of steak and French fried, and said:
    "Oh, sweetie-pie, ” for it is thus that she habitually addresses the other half of the sketch, "you haven't forgotten it's Algy's birthday on the twenty-third? Just think! He'll be one year old."
    "Pretty senile, pretty senile," said Bingo. "Silver threads among the gold, what? We must give him a rattle or something."
    "We can do better than rattles. Shall I tell you the wonderful thing I've thought of?"
    "Say on, old partner in sickness and in health."
    And Mrs. Bingo said that she had decided to start a wee little deposit account for Algernon Aubrey at the local bank. She was going to pay in ten pounds, and her mother was going to pay in ten pounds, and so was the child's maternal aunt Isabel, and what a lovely surprise it would be for the young buster, when he got older, to find that all unknown his dear ones had been working on his behalf, bumping up his holdings like billy-o. And Bingo, mellowed by a father's love, got the party spirit and said that if that was the trend affairs were taking, blow him tight if he didn't chip in and add to the kitty his own personal tenner.
    Upon which, Mrs. Bingo said: "Oh, sweet-ie pie !" And kissed him with a good deal of fervour, and the curtain of Act One falls on a happy and united home.
    Now, though at the moment when he made this fine gesture Bingo actually had ten quid in his possession, having touched Purkiss for an advance on his salary, one would have expected him, thinking things over in the cold grey light of the morning after, to kick himself soundly for having been such an ass as to utter those unguarded words, committing him as they did to a course of conduct