Mr Mulliner Speaking by P. G. Wodehouse Page A

scrutinizing Cedric narrowly.
     
'Mulliner? You're the fellow my daughter works for, aren't you?'
     
'I am,' said Cedric.
     
'And you want to marry her?'
     
'Certainly he wants to marry me,' said Myrtle, before Cedric could reply.
     
And suddenly something inside Cedric seemed to say 'Why not?' It was true that he had never contemplated matrimony, except with that shrinking horror which all middle-aged bachelors feel when the thought of it comes into their minds in moments of depression. It was true, also, that if he had been asked to submit specifications for a bride, he would have sketched out something differing from Myrtle Watling in not a few respects. But, after all, he felt as he looked at her strong, capable face, with a wife like this girl he would at least be shielded and sheltered from the world, and never again exposed to the sort of thing he had been going through that afternoon. It seemed good enough.
     
And there was another thing. And to a man of Cedric's strong Republican views it was perhaps the most important of all. Whatever you might say against Myrtle Watling, she was not a member of the gay and heartless aristocracy. No Sussex Booles, no Hants Hilsbury-Hepworths in her family. She came of good, solid suburban stock, related on the male side to the Higginsons of Tangerine Road, Wandsworth, and through the female branch connected with the Browns of Bickley, the Perkinses of Peckham, and the Wodgers, – the Winchmore Hill Wodgers, not the Ponder's End lot.
     
'It is my dearest wish,' said Cedric in a low, steady voice. 'And if somebody will kindly lift this window off my neck and kick this beastly cat or something which keeps clawing my leg, we can all get together and talk it over.'
     

4 THE ORDEAL OF OSBERT MULLINER
The unwonted gravity of Mr Mulliner's demeanour had struck us all directly he entered the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest: and the silent, moody way in which he sipped his hot Scotch and lemon convinced us that something was wrong. We hastened to make sympathetic inquiries.
     
Our solicitude seemed to please him. He brightened a little.
     
'Well, gentlemen,' he said, 'I had not intended to intrude my private troubles on this happy gathering, but, if you must know, a young second cousin of mine has left his wife and is filing papers of divorce. It has upset me very much.'
     
Miss Postlethwaite, our warm-hearted barmaid, who was polishing glasses, introduced a sort of bedside manner into her task.
     
'Some viper crept into his home?' she asked.
     
Mr Mulliner shook his head.
     
'No,' he said. 'No vipers. The whole trouble appears to have been that, whenever my second cousin spoke to his wife, she would open her eyes to their fullest extent, put her head on one side like a canary, and say ''What?'' He said he had stood it for eleven months and three days, which he believes to be a European record, and that the time had now come, in his opinion, to take steps.'
     
'The fact of the matter is,' he said, 'marriage to-day is made much too simple for a man. He finds it so easy to go out and grab some sweet girl that when he has got her he does not value her. I am convinced that that is the real cause of this modern boom in divorce. What marriage needs, to make it a stable institution, is something in the nature of obstacles during the courtship period. I attribute the solid happiness of my nephew Osbert's union, to take but one instance, to the events which preceded it. If the thing had been a walk-over, he would have prized his wife far less highly.'
     
'It took him a long time to teach her his true worth?' we asked.
     
'Love burgeoned slowly?' hazarded Miss Postlethwaite.
     
'On the contrary,' said Mr Mulliner, 'she loved him at first sight. What made the wooing of Mabel Petherick-Soames so extraordinarily difficult for my nephew Osbert was not any coldness on her part, but the unfortunate mental attitude of J. Bashford Braddock. Does that name suggest anything to you,