A Drones Club tale, featuring Freddie Widgeon.

Freddie Widgeon surprises all the Eggs, Beans and Crumpets in his betrothal to Mavis Peasemarch, but more so that he has the blessings of her father, Old Bodders (fifth Earl of Bodsham), who was quite an exacting and finicky father that leaned on the religious side.

A trip to America brought Freddie, Mavis and Bodders to New York and, after settling into their hotel rooms, Freddie went off to revel in his happiness of being engaged to Mavis. He went about making a nuisance of himself by beaming his smiling face on New Yorkers (which they take as a prelude to a mugging).

He saw a young woman carrying a large, heavy suitcase and, being a gentleman, Freddie offered to help her with the case, which he did up to her fourth-story apartment on 69th St. After walking the cumbersome object up four flights of stairs, he sat down to rest as the woman put things away.

Suddenly, the door bursts open and three burly men with bowler hats and cigars stand in the doorway. They are detectives and call the woman "Mrs. Silvers" and gloat how their case is "open and shut." The young woman asks them where they think they are, to which they reply "in apartment 4-A, home of Mrs. Silvers." Freddie gulps as he envisions the headlines of the newspaper reading "Sugar Daddy Caught in Love Nest."

They are informed that they are in apartment 4-B, and that the young woman is not Mrs. Silvers. The chagrined detectives grovel apologetically, pay for the door and leave. The scene is quite a funny one and, relieved, Freddie leaves to meet Mavis and Old Bodders for lunch.

Freddie always lacks for good lunch conversation, so he knows that he will have his two guests rolling in the aisles when he tells them of the incident he just had. After Bodders and Mavis finish their disapproval of New York lifestyles, Freddie decides to introduce his story. He tells it well and when he finishes finds that rather than roll in the aisles of the restaurant, his two guests resemble rather stiff statues.

"Is it your practice, may I ask, to scrape acquaintance in the public streets with young persons of the opposite sex?" asks Old Bodders in a stern, cold manner. Mavis chips in to assure her father that the girl was probably very pretty, which would explain Freddie's behavior. Freddie retorts that the girl was a gargoyle, which is to no avail.

After experiencing an interrogation that the bowler-hatted detectives would have been proud of, Freddie sits helplessly to watch Mavis and her father exit in cold silence.

Freddie has an idea how to mend this rift in the lute. He will find the young woman and ask her to meet Mavis. This, he is sure, will show Mavis that it was not the woman's allure that caused Freddie to help her.

Freddie goes back to apartment 4-B but finds the woman is not home. As he knocks, a beautiful, blonde neighbor dressed in a negligee opens her door and asks him who he is looking for. She has a window that is stuck in her apartment and wants Freddie to help open it, because of the heat. Freddie agrees to do this.

Inside her hot apartment, Freddie takes off his coat and loosens his collar. He tries and tries to loosen the window, but it won't budge. He sits down to get his breath, and the woman hands him a cool drink that he gulps down.

As if in a flash of Deja Vu, the front door bursts open and standing there are the same three detectives, bowler-hatted and smoking cigars. They recognize Freddie and refer to him as "the swiftest worker in New York." Freddie wishes to rise and rebut this slur, but he can't because the blonde is now sitting in his lap, impeding his progress.

Once she gets up from his lap, Freddie argues with the detectives and implores his innocence. A gentleman wouldn't wear a hat inside a building and Freddie tells the detective to remove his bowler hat, and to accentuate this order, he hits the detective in the right eye.

What followed was not easily recalled by Freddie, though it brought up glimpses of arms and legs and violence resulting in his finding himself staying overnight in jail, and his story and picture splashed across the newspaper page that Old Bodders read every morning at breakfast.

Not wanting to explain and defend this situation to Old Bodders and Mavis, Freddie quietly boarded the ship sailing home to England and waved good-bye to the whole affair.