“You will do it, young Bertie, or never darken my doors again. And you know what that means. No more of Anatole’s dinners for you.’
A strong shudder shook me. She was alluding to her chef, that superb artist. A monarch of his profession, unsurpassed – nay, unequalled – at dishing up the raw material so that it melted in the mouth of the ultimate consumer, Anatole had always been a magnet that drew me to Brinkley Court with my tongue hanging out. Many of my happiest moments had been those which I had spent champing this great man’s roasts and ragouts, and the prospect of being barred from digging into them in the future was a numbing one.
‘No, I say, dash it!’
‘I thought that would rattle you. Greedy young pig.’
‘Greedy young pigs have nothing to do with it,’ I said with a touch of hauteur. ‘One is not a greedy young pig because one appreciates the cooking of a genius.’
‘Well, I will say I like it myself,’ conceded the relative. ‘But not another bite of it do you get, if you refuse to do this simple, easy, pleasant job. No, not so much as another sniff. So put that in your twelve-inch cigarette-holder and smoke it.’”
P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)
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