Love at First Bite
Sam felt that his epic romance might have started more promisingly.
1921
Introduction
Wodehouse puts forth all his powers here to tell us everything we need to know about rich, athletic and amiably dim Sam Marlowe. The susceptible Sam has just arrived in New York from England, and now finds himself next to a very pretty girl. Something, however, seems to be clouding this sunshine moment.
abridged
IT seemed to Sam that he had been bitten, and this puzzled him, for New York crowds, though they may shove and jostle, rarely bite.
He found himself face to face with an extraordinarily pretty girl.
She was not the prettiest girl he had ever seen. She was the third prettiest. He had an orderly mind, one capable of classifying and docketing girls. But there was a subtle something about her, a sort of how-shall-one-put-it, which he had never encountered before.
He swallowed convulsively. His well-developed chest swelled beneath its covering of blue flannel and invisible stripe. At last, he told himself, he was in love, really in love, and at first sight, too, which made it all the more impressive. He doubted whether in the whole course of history anything like this had ever happened before to anybody. Oh, to clasp this girl to him and... .
But she had bitten him in the arm. That was hardly the right spirit. That, he felt, constituted an obstacle.
abridged
Abridged from ‘The Girl on the Boat’ (1921), by P. G. Wodehouse
