The Girl on the Boat - Penn State University

“That’s good.”
“But you’re not!”
“No?”
“No!”
“Oh!”
Silence fell. Sam was feeling hurt and bewildered.
He could not understand her mood. He had come up
expecting to be soothed and comforted and she was
like a petulant iceberg. Cynically, he recalled some lines
of poetry which he had had to write out a hundred
times on one occasion at school as a punishment for
having introduced a white mouse into chapel.
“Oh, woman, in our hours of ease,
Un-something, something, something, please.
When tiddly-umpty umpty brow,
A something something something thou!”
He had forgotten the exact words, but the gist of it
had been that Woman, however she might treat a man
in times of prosperity, could be relied on to rally round
P. G. Wodehouse
75
and do the right thing when he was in trouble. How
little the poet had known woman.
“Why not?” he said huffily.
She gave a little sob.
“I put you on a pedestal and I find you have feet of
clay. You have blurred the image which I formed of
you. I can never think of you again without picturing
you as you stood in that saloon, stammering and helpless
….”
“Well, what can you do when your pianist runs out
on you?”
“You could have done something!” <strong>The</strong> words she had
spoken only yesterday to Jane Hubbard came back to
her. “I can’t forgive a man for looking ridiculous. Oh,
what, what,” she cried, “induced you to try to give an
imitation of Bert Williams?”
Sam started, stung to the quick.
“It wasn’t Bert Williams. It was Frank Tinney!”
“Well, how was I to know?”
“I did my best,” said Sam sullenly.
“That is the awful thought.”