The Spring Suit

by P.G. Wodehouse

Rosie was going to buy a new spring suit for George’s birthday. Looking at that sentence again, I see that it could be open to misconstruction. The suit was for herself. But it was to be bought in honour of George’s birthday and flashed before his admiring gaze for the duration of that occasion. Altogether, taking it all round, George Mellon’s twenty-first birthday promised to be one of the biggest things in history. In the afternoon he was going to strike his employer for a raise, in the evening he and Rosie would dine at the McAstor instead of the red-ink place they usually frequented, and at night they would take in a show, with possibly a bite of supper afterwards at a cabaret place. A formidable program, and one that made it imperative that Rosie’s dress should not be out of the picture. She had been saving all the winter to buy a really irreproachable suit, and the money was in the bank, straining at the leash. All that remained was to make a good selection. You probably know Rosie by sight. She sits in a sort of kiosk in front of one of those motion picture palaces that have sprung up in recent years like a rash on the face of our fair city. You hand your money in through a little pigeonhole in the glass front of her den and she presses a button, causing a cardboard ticket to leap at you out of a brass slab. Thus far you may argue that I have not sufficiently identified Rosie, New York being full of girls who do conjuring tricks in glass cages. True, since the movie delirium set in, there are a great many girls who do this. But Rosie is the one who smiles. The Others give you your ticket with a sort of aloof hauteur. They have a resigned air, as if the spectacle of multitudes wasting money on the movies saddened them. If they spoke you feel that they would say: “Oh, well, what’s the use? There’s one born every minute

Genres: Fiction, Humor

24 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2004

About the author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Reviews

[Plum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amusing and some wry observations that still stand today.

[Chetan Hemaraju · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow# Falling in love with P.G.W. writings# Keeping it simple yet bring a while world.around you, be whatever the factor may be# Just One read, teaches you a whole.lot about Writing#

& BTW why do I feel the stout girl to ne narrating me, be a Black Girl# I feel fixed#

[Esteban · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very Wodehousy short story.
A girl and a boy, a misunderstanding, coolness between them, reconciliation, everything ends up all right!