Doctor Sally by P.G. Wodehouse

Author:P.G. Wodehouse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-10-01T20:52:46+00:00

CHAPTER IX

THE summons to William Bannister’s sick-bed had come to Sally, oddly enough, at a moment when she had just been thinking of that sufferer; for it is a curious fact that, busy woman though she was, she had found herself thinking quite a good deal about Bill in these last two weeks. And, if excuses must be made for her, let these meditations be set down to the quality in him that made him different from other men—his naive directness.

Sally, both in her native America and during her stay in England, had been called upon at fairly frequent intervals to reject the proffered hands and hearts of many men. These had conducted the negotiations in a variety of ways, but none, not even the most forceful, had affected her quite like William Bannister. There was a childlike earnestness about his wooing which she found engaging.

It seemed a pity to her that with the admirable quality of directness he should combine that other quality which above all others in this world she despised and disliked—the quality of being content to sit down and loaf his life away on inherited money. She had seen so many of these good-looking, amiable, feckless Englishmen of private means, and all her instincts rose against them. Except as a joke, they were impossible. With so much to be done in life, they did nothing.

And Bill Bannister was one of them. She liked his looks and that easy, athletic swing of his body. She found him pleasant and agreeable. But he was also bone-idle, a well-bred waster, a drone who had nothing better to do with his time than hang about seashore resorts, dangling after perfumed and peroxided females of doubtful character.

For Sally’s verdict on Lottie, pieced together from a brief acquaintance and a review of the dubious circumstances in which she had found her, was not a flattering one. She ignored the “Higginbotham “, which should have been such a hall-mark of respectability. She thoroughly disbelieved in the Higginbotham. Her views on the late Mr. Higginbotham were identical with those of Betsey Prig on her friend Sairey Gamp’s friend Mrs; Harris. Firmly and decisively, Sally had set Lottie down in the ranks of those who are so well described as “no better than they should be “.

Sometimes Sally wondered a little why it was that she should feel this odd indignation against a woman who was virtually a complete stranger. It could not be because the other had ensnared William Bannister. William Bannister and his affairs were, of course, nothing to her. So what might have seemed to a superficial investigator a straight case of jealousy was nothing of the kind. It did not matter to her a row of pins who entrapped William Bannister.

Nevertheless, every time she thought of Lottie an odd thrill of indignation passed through Sally.

And every time she thought of William Bannister wasting his time on such a woman she felt another thrill of indignation.

The whole thing was perplexing.

Her feelings, as she bowled along the Hampshire roads in Bill’s Rolls Royce to-night, were mixed.

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