The Code says that if a girl says to a man, 'I'm going to marry you,' he can't say, 'Oh no, you're not!' So here's poor Bertie twice having to face Sir Watkyn Bassett as a prospective relation-by-marriage: once when his daughter Madeline gives Gussie the air and claims she will marry Bertie: and once when his ward Stiffy Byng uses Bertie as a shock-absorber in her determination to get Sir Watkyn to approve her marriage to the Rev. 'Stinker' Pinker. And Sir Watkyn, as the Bosher Street magistrate, had recently fined Bertie £5 for trying to steal a policeman's helmet on Boat Race Night.

Sir Watkyn has treacherously bought a silver cow-creamer that Aunt Dahlia insists ethically belongs to her husband, rival collector, Bertie's Uncle Tom. So, on threat of his never getting another meal of Anatole's cooking, she tells Bertie to go to Totleigh Towers and steal the cow-creamer for Uncle Tom. Gussie Fink-Nottle, scared at the thought of having to make a speech at his wedding breakfast, in front of such people as Sir Watkyn and Spode, the amateur dictator (Sir Watkyn is hoping to marry Spode's aunt), takes Jeeves's advice and makes notes, in a little book, of all the despicable points about Sir Watkyn and Spode; the idea being that this will enable him to face them calmly, despising them for, e.g. the way they eat asparagus. Well, of course, Gussie loses this explosive notebook and of course it gets into the hands of Sir Watkyn and Spode. Meanwhile Sir Watkyn wants Anatole, and Uncle Tom is briefly prepared to trade the super chef for the cow-creamer, and Aunt Dahlia is briefly prepared to trade him for Bertie's release from a likely thirty days in prison. And Stiffy is feuding with the local policeman and gets her curate fiancé to pinch his helmet. And Jeeves learns Spode's dark secret from the Junior Ganymede Book of Revelations. It's our first meeting with this man of wrath, leader of the Black Shorts, and we wonder what Oswald Mosley made of the loud and sustained raspberry this book delivered to him and his movement.

A Wodehouse plot more complicated than any yet, clockwork with a hundred moving parts, interdependence absolute and a patter of verbal felicities, five or six to a page. Stiffy Byng is possibly the fizziest of all Wodehouse's fizzy girls, quick to anger, tears and revenge-deplorable, adorable. We assume that Jeeves got Bertie off on that world cruise - he had bought the tickets, though the young master had said No. A reverse forfeit.

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