A Damsel in Distress

This is almost a Blandings novel. Belpher Castle is in Hampshire, but it has an amber drawing-room, a terrace below and a rose garden. Its widower châtelain is the Earl of Marshmoreton. He is a great gardener, he is bossed by his sister, he has a butler who looks like a saintly bishop and a foolish son and heir. He marries, at the end, a charming (American) chorus girl, a felicity never allowed to Lord Emsworth - only to his nephew Ronnie Fish.

The hero of this book is American composer George Bevan. The heroine is Lady Maud Marsh, the Earl's daughter, a good golfer, with tilted nose. She is a captive at the castle under aunt's orders because of her 'ridiculous infatuation' for an impossible American. That's not, in fact, George Bevan. Bevan is eminently possible: nice, a golfer, with a good line in Psmith talk, and he makes $5,000 a week in a theatre season in a good year, which is not hay even with $5 to the £1. (Italian restaurants in Soho serve table d'hôte lunches for 1s 6d and you get your top-hat ironed in your shaving parlour.)

A good deal of good theatre stuff here and a two-weeks house-party with a ball at the castle for the son and heir's twenty-first birthday. The impossible American who has been a threat to George Bevan's courtship of Maud only comes on stage briefly at the end. When she had fallen for him he had been a 'slim Apollo'. Then he had gone out of her life, but not heart, for a year - during which he had, incidentally, been toying, under an assumed name and the nickname Tootles', with the affection of a nice chorus girl (is there ever a nasty chorus girl in a story or novel of Wodehouse's?) to the tune of £10,000 for breach of promise - and now he returns, thirty pounds overweight and talking about food, not love. It is easy for Maud to make the big decision and say Yes to George.

Source: Richard Usborne. Plum Sauce. A P G Wodehouse Companion.