Produced by Suzanne L. Shell, Tom Allen, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
By P. G. Wodehouse
In which the Little Nugget is introduced to the reader, and plansare made for his future by several interested parties. In which,also, the future Mr Peter Burns is touched upon. The whole concludingwith a momentous telephone-call.
If the management of the Hotel Guelph, that London landmark, couldhave been present at three o'clock one afternoon in early Januaryin the sitting-room of the suite which they had assigned to MrsElmer Ford, late of New York, they might well have felt a littleaggrieved. Philosophers among them would possibly have meditatedon the limitations of human effort; for they had done their bestfor Mrs Ford. They had housed her well. They had fed her well.They had caused inspired servants to anticipate her every need.Yet here she was, in the midst of all these aids to a contentedmind, exhibiting a restlessness and impatience of her surroundingsthat would have been noticeable in a caged tigress or a prisonerof the Bastille. She paced the room. She sat down, picked up anovel, dropped it, and, rising, resumed her patrol. The clockstriking, she compared it with her watch, which she had consultedtwo minutes before. She opened the locket that hung by a goldchain from her neck, looked at its contents, and sighed. Finally,going quickly into the bedroom, she took from a suit-case a framedoil-painting, and returning with it to the sitting-room, placed iton a chair, and stepped back, gazing at it hungrily. Her largebrown eyes, normally hard and imperious, were strangely softened.Her mouth quivered.
'Ogden!' she whispered.
The picture which had inspired this exhibition of feeling wouldprobably not have affected the casual spectator to quite the samedegree. He would have seen merely a very faulty and amateurishportrait of a singularly repellent little boy of about eleven, whostared out from the canvas with an expression half stolid, halfquerulous; a bulgy, overfed little boy; a little boy who lookedexactly what he was, the spoiled child of parents who had far moremoney than was good for them.
As Mrs Ford gazed at the picture, and the picture stared back ather, the telephone bell rang. She ran to it eagerly. It was theoffice of the hotel, announcing a caller.
'Yes? Yes? Who?' Her voice fell, as if the name was not the oneshe had expected. 'Oh, yes,' she said. 'Yes, ask Lord Mountry tocome to me here, please.'
She returned to the portrait. The look of impatience, which hadleft her face as the bell sounded, was back now. She suppressed itwith an effort as her visitor entered.
Lord Mountry was a blond, pink-faced, fair-moustached young man ofabout twenty-eight—a thick-set, solemn young man. He winced as hecaught sight of the picture, which fixed him with a stony eyeimmediately on his entry, and quickly looked away.
'I say, it's all right, Mrs Ford.' He was of the type which wastesno time on preliminary greetings. 'I've got him.'
'Got him!'
Mrs Ford's voice was startled.
'Stanborough, you know.'
'Oh! I—I was thinking of something else. Won't you sit down?'
Lord Mountry sat down.
'The artist, you know