It is curious how often the gods who make sport of us poor humans defeat their own ends by overdoing the thing. Any contretemps less awful than this, however slightly less awful, would undoubtedly have left me as limp as a sheet of carbon paper, rattled and stammering, in prime condition to be made sport of. But as it was I found myself strangely cool. I had a subconscious feeling that there would be a reaction later, and that the next time I looked in a mirror I should find my hair strangely whitened, but for the moment I was unnaturally composed, and my brain buzzed like a circular-saw in an ice-box. “How do you do?” I heard myself say. My voice seemed to come from a long distance, but it was steady and even pleasing in timbre. “You wished to see me, Mr. Corcoran?” “Yes.” “Then why,” enquired Miss Ukridge, softly, “did you ask for my secretary?” There was that same acid sub-tinkle in her voice which had been there at our previous battle in the same ring. But that odd alertness stood by me well. “I understood that you were out of town,” I said. “Who told you that?” “They were saying so at the Savage Club the other night.” This seemed to hold her. “Why did you wish to see me?” she asked, baffled by my ready intelligence. “I hoped to get a few facts concerning your proposed lecture tour in America.” “How did you know that I was about to lecture in America?” I raised my eyebrows. This was childish. “They were saying so at the Savage Club,” I replied. Baffled again. “I had an idea, Mr. Corcoran,” she said, with a nasty gleam in her blue eyes, “that you might be the person alluded to in my nephew Stanley’s telegram.” “Telegram?” “Yes. I altered my plans and returned to London last night instead of waiting till this evening, and I had scarcely arrived when a telegram came, signed Ukridge, from the village where I had been staying. It instructed my secretary to hand over to a gentleman who would call this morning the draft of the speech which I am to deliver at the dinner of the Pen and Ink Club. I assume the thing to have been some obscure practical joke on the part of my nephew, Stanley. And I also assumed, Mr. Corcoran, that you must be the gentleman alluded to.” I could parry this sort of stuff all day. “What an odd idea!” I said. “You think it odd? Then why did you tell my butler that my secretary was expecting you?” It was the worst one yet, but I blocked it. “The man must have misunderstood me. He seemed,” I added, loftily, “an unintelligent sort of fellow.”