Jeeves disapproves of the white evening mess jacket that Bertie has brought back from Cannes. Bertie disapproves of all his friends taking their troubles direct to Jeeves, bypassing him. Newtdoving teetotaller Gussie Fink-Nottle is in love with soupy Madeline Bassett and fears to speak. Tuppy Glossop has quarrelled with his fiancée Angela Travers. Aunt Dahlia has lost, at baccarat, money that Uncle Tom gave her to pay the bills of her magazine, Milady's Boudoir. And she has to find someone to give the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School of which she is a governor. Bertie, funking it himself, persuades her to make Gussie do the prize-giving, and he and Jeeves lace Gussie's orange juice with gin, and more gin, to get his courage up. The prize-giving is a riot, probably the best-sustained and most anthologized two chapters of Wodehouse. Bertie's attempt to tell Madeline of Gussie's love for her convinces her that he is pleading his own cause. Bertie's recommendation to Gussie, Tuppy and Aunt Dahlia to seek sympathy from their loved ones by going off their feed, causes Anatole to give notice. Bertie's idea of ringing the fire-alarm bell at Brinkley (in order to get Tuppy to rescue Angela and thus show his love) results in the whole household being locked out in the small hours and Bertie's having to bicycle eighteen miles without lights to get the key.

Not Bertie's finest hours, these. But Jeeves solves all the problems in his own ways and Bertie forfeits the mess jacket.

You can feel a three-act plot and pattern here similar to that of Thank Tou, Jeeves. Wodehouse, knowing he's got it right, will do it again and again, with only minor variations of names, places and time, in the five or six subsequent Bertie/Jeeves novels. It's vintage Wodehouse. What bounty!

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