Funny / Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

• "Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice."
• Bertie, yet again, finds himself in a sticky situation.
  I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous.
• Bertie is on the phone with Florence Craye, who talks about how jealous her (hulking, aggressive) fiancée, "Stilton" Cheesewright is, saying: "Why, if he even found out I was telephoning to you now, he would have a fit." At this moment, Stilton enters Bertie's room.
  It was a moment for quick thinking. One doesn't want fellows having fits all over one's sitting-room. I was extremely dubious, moreover, as to whether, should he ascertain who was at the other end of the wire, he would confine himself to fits.
  'Certainly Catsmeat,' I said. 'Of course, Catsmeat. I quite understand, Catsmeat. But I'll have to ring off now, Catsmeat, as our mutual friend Cheesewright has just come in. Good-bye, Catsmeat.'
  I hung up the receiver and turned to Stilton. 'That was Catsmeat,' I said.
• Aunt Dahlia wants Bertie to have dinner with the Trotters. He describes it to Jeeves as "a blind date with some slabs of gorgonzola sponsored by Aunt Dahlia".
• Bertie mixes his metaphors.
  I had the disquieting impression that it wouldn’t take too much to make the Stilton-Florence axis go p'fft again, and who could say that in this event, the latter, back in circulation, would not decide to hitch on to me once more? I remembered what had happened that other time and, as the fellow said, the burned child fears the spilled milk.
• Bertie tries to get out of visiting Aunt Dahlia by saying he refused to give another guest money. Aunt Dahlia replies that he needn't worry about it, because said guest got money from somewhere else.
  Aunt Dahlia: So you needn't be shy about meeting him. What if he does think you the world's premier louse? Don't we all?
• Aunt Dahlia convinces Bertie to "steal" her necklace and tells him her bedroom is "the end one on the left". Bertie follows her instructions, but ends up in Florence's bedroom by mistake. Then Cheesewright comes along and finds him there, and then when Bertie tries to escape he finds the ladder has vanished.
  • Then, when Bertie finally goes back to his own room, he finds Aunt Dahlia waiting from him.
    Bertie: Would you mind informing me in a few simple words why you told me that your window was the end one on the left?
    Aunt Dahlia: It is the end one on the left. [...] Looking from the house.
    Bertie: Oh, looking from the house? I thought you meant looking at the house.
    Aunt Dahlia: Don't tell me you got into the wrong room?
    Bertie: It could scarcely have been wronger.
  • After Aunt Dahlia learns whose room Bertie broke into, she says, "You'll have to marry [Florence]... though I doubt if she would have you."
  • Even after all this, Aunt Dahlia doesn't give up on her burglary plan.
    Aunt Dahlia: You'd better go and shift that ladder to the right window.
    [...]
    Bertie: ...The ladder isn't there. [...] Under the right window, or perhaps I should say the wrong window. When I looked out, it was gone.
    Aunt Dahlia: Nonsense. Ladders don't melt into thin air.
    Bertie: They do, I assure you, at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh. I don't know what conditions prevail elsewhere, but at Brinkley Court they vanish if you take your eye off them for so much as an instant.
    Aunt Dahlia: You mean the ladder's disappeared?
    Bertie: That is precisely the point I was endeavouring to establish. It has folded its tents like the Arabs and silently stolen away.
  • Uncle Tom comes along and reveals he took the ladder.
    Uncle Tom: The place is alive with burglars.
    Aunt Dahlia: Burglars? What gives you that idea? I haven't seen any burglars. Have you, Bertie?
    Bertie: Not one. I remember thinking how odd it was.
    [...]
    Uncle Tom: I saw a ladder. When I was taking my stroll in the garden before going to bed. Propped up against one of the windows. I took it away in the nick of time. A minute later, and burglars would have been streaming up it in their thousands.
• "I moved in a mysterious way my wonders to perform, but was impeded by a number of Acts of God."
• "There is one drawback to not wearing a moustache, and that is that if you don’t have one, you’ve got nothing to twirl when baffled. All you can do is stand with your lower jaw drooping like a tired lily, looking a priceless ass, and that is what Stilton was doing now. His whole demeanour was that of an Assyrian who, having come down like a wolf on the fold, finds in residence not lambs but wild cats, than which, of course, nothing makes an Assyrian feel sillier."
• Even the book's opening dedication to Wodehouse's editor Peter Schwed is funny, being a extended snarky commentary on the various types of dedications used in novels.
  TO P.S.
  Half a league
  Half a league
  Half a league
  Onward
  With a hey-nonny-nonny
  And a hot cha-cha
  P. G. WODEHOUSE
  Colney Hatch, 1954