"... You a married man, Mr. Grimethorpe?"
"What the hell´s that to you?" growled the farmer, rounding on him with such ferocity that Wimsey looked about quite nervously for the dogs before-mentioned.
"Oh, nothin´," he replied, "only I thought that charmin´ little girl might be yours."
"And if I thought she weren´t," said Mr. Grimethorpe, "I´d strangle the bitch and her mother together. What has got to say to that?"
As a matter of fact, the remark, considered as a conversational formula, seemed to leave so much to be desired that Wimsey´s natural loquacity suffered a severe check. He fell back, however, on the usual resource of the male, and offered Mr Grimethorpe a cigar, thinking to himself as he did so:
"What the hell of a life the woman must lead."
Wimsey doesn´t know what to say? This has to be a first. And someone should tell him that it is a very bad idea to be smitten with the wife of this particular gentleman.
Also, the things Lord Peter are contemplating while being in a depressive mood are so random:
Peter leaned sadly upon the hurdles and abandoned himself to a variety of shallow considerations upon (1) The vanity of human wishes; (2) Mutability; (3) First love; (4) The decay of idealism; (5) The aftermath of the Great War; (6) Birth-control; and (7) The fallacy of free-will.
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