Plum Pie by P. G. Wodehouse

McMurdo. She says she wouldn't marry you if you were the last publisher on earth and wouldn't let you sponsor her novel if you begged her on bended knees. She says she is going to let Simon and Schuster have it, and she hopes that will be a lesson to you."
    Cyril drew a deep breath.
    "Pepperidge, you're wonderful!"
    "One does one's best," said the Professor modestly. "Well, now that the happy ending has been achieved, how about returning to the bar? I'll buy you a lemon squash."
    "Do you really like that stuff?"
    "I love it."
    It was on the tip of Cyril's tongue to say that one would have thought he was a man who would be more likely to share Count Dracula's preference for human blood when thirsty, but he refrained from putting the thought into words. It might, he felt, be lacking in tact, and after all, why criticise a man for looking like something out of a horror film if his heart was so patently of the purest gold. It is the heart that matters, not the features, however unshuffled.
    "I'm with you," he said. "A lemon squash would be most refreshing."
    "They serve a very good lemon squash here."
    "Probably made from contented lemons."
    "I shouldn't wonder," said the Professor.
    He smiled a hideous smile. It had just occurred to him that if he hypnotised the waiter, he would be spared the necessity of disbursing money, always a consideration to a man of slender means.
     
     

 
    Our Man in America
     
     
     
     
    The trend in Television Westerns is now towards sweetness and light. 'Adult Westerns' they call them, an adult Western broadly speaking, being one where gun play is kept down to a minimum and the good guy does not kill the bad guy but tries to understand him. The sheriff who used to start the conversational ball rolling with some such remark as "Best say your prayers, Hank Spivis, 'cos Ah'm a-goin' to drill yer like a dawg" is out of vogue. Today he leads the man to the office couch and psychoanalyses him. It turns out in the end that the reason why Hank rustles cattle and shoots up the Malemute saloon on Saturday nights is that, when he was three, his mother took away his all-day sucker, and we fade out on a medium shot of him, a reformed character in a morning coat and top hat, selling his life story to a motion picture studio for a hundred thousand dollars.
    Indians, too, rarely bite the dust nowadays on the Television screen. They have a quiet talk with the Commandant of the U.S. Cavalry at the fort ("Is your scalping really necessary?") as the result of which they toddle off and go into the hay, corn and feed business and do well.
     
    *
     
    The mystery, which has puzzled so many, of where all these darned American novels come from is partially solved by an interview in one of the papers with a Mrs. Handy, who runs the Handy Colony for Writers at Marshall, Illinois, and encourages young authors in their dark work, taking in twenty at a time.
    "Everybody's up at five each morning," says Mrs. Handy, "then a quick bite and right to work on their novels. I go over everything they write, keeping after them, making them rewrite. Everybody writes around the camp. My mother-in-law is ninety. She learned to type at eighty-five and has just finished her first novel. It's not right. She'll have to do it again."
    To me the interesting thing about this is that it makes it plain that American novels are produced deliberately. For years I had been looking on them as just Acts of God like those waterspouts, attacks by pirates and mutiny on the high seas which you are warned to look out for when you travel on the White-Star-Cunard line.
     
    *
     
    Dieting continues to be all the go. on this side of the Atlantic and the number of those who hope to become streamlined by pushing their plates away untasted increases daily. But there are still some sturdy souls who enjoy a square meal, notably in Detroit, Michigan. The health commissioner of that city has just published a list of the peculiar things eaten and drunk by the