to interfere, leaves. Steve, hoping to reunite Kirk and Ruth, decides to kidnap Bill. Bill happily goes with him to Connecticut. Steve leaves a note for Mamie. She tells Kirk, and they follow Steve. Meanwhile, Ruth, who has realized Kirk was right, goes to see Bailey. He is very ill due to stress from work. Bailey recovers, but his financial risks have failed and he and Ruth have lost their money. Ruth is glad the money is gone, and has new respect for Bailey, since she sees how much his wife Sybil cares about him. Ruth assures Sybil that Bailey will be successful again. Mrs. Porter, thinking Kirk has run off with Mamie, finds Ruth and brings her to Connecticut. In Connecticut, Mrs. Porter is defeated when Steve says Mamie is his fiancée and Ruth reconciles with Kirk. Kirk looks forward to living a happy, simple life with her and Bill. Style Much of Wodehouse's work combines elements of romance and humour or farce, including even the relatively serious stories The Coming of Bill and The Little Nugget. One example in The Coming of Bill of a "typically Wodehousian" farcical remark is a quote which makes light of Mrs. Porter's views on heredity, after she drives too fast and hits George Pennicut with her car (in chapter I.1): "She was incensed with this idiot who had flung himself before her car, not reflecting in her heat that he probably had a pre-natal tendency to this sort of thing inherited from some ancestor who had played "last across" in front of hansom cabs in the streets of London." Background In The Coming of Bill, a butler named Keggs is employed by the Bannisters and later by the Winfields. A butler named Keggs appears in several other Wodehouse stories, though it is unclear which of these characters are the same. Other stories with such a character include the 1909 novella The Gem Collector and the 1910 short story “The Good Angel” (collected in The Man Upstairs). There is a landlord and retired butler named Augustus Keggs in Something Fishy (1957) and Ice in the Bedroom (1961), who was a butler in the 1919 novel A Damsel in Distress. Wodehouse married his wife Ethel in 1914 and gained a step-daughter, Leonora; when Wodehouse first met Leonora in 1915, they immediately became close, and he formally adopted her later that year. According to writer