The Girl on the Boat

Wilhelmina Bennett, known as Billie, has red hair, a devotion to dogs, and an unfortunate habit of getting engaged. Aboard a White Star liner bound from New York to England she is promised to Eustace Hignett, a nervous poet thoroughly cowed by his mother, a celebrated writer on theosophy. Eustace’s cousin Sam Marlowe falls for Billie roughly on sight and spends the crossing, then a long English summer, trying to prove himself heroic through schemes that collapse under him. Ashore the comedy shifts to Windles, the Hignett seat in Hampshire, let to the Bennetts behind Mrs Hignett’s back and defended at one point with an elephant gun by Jane Hubbard, a big-game huntress with her own designs on Eustace. Wodehouse serialised it in 1921 as Three Men and a Maid.