Jeeves is on holiday in Herne Bay, and while he's away the world caves in on Bertie Wooster. For a start, he's astonished to read in the Times of his engagement to the mercurial Bobbie Wickham. Then at Brinkley Court, his aunt Dahlia's establishment, he finds his awful former headmaster in attendance ready to award the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. And finally the Brinkley butler turns out, for reasons of his own, to be Bertie's nemesis in disguise, the brain surgeon Sir Roderick Glossop.