Piccadilly Jim: Filling Out a Form for a Transatlantic Crossing

The clerk had finished writing the ticket, and was pressing labels and a pink paper on him. The paper, he gathered dully, was a form and had to be filled up. He examined it, and found it to be a searching document. Some of its questions could be answered off-hand, others required thought.

“Height?” Simple. Five foot eleven.

“Hair?” Simple. Brown.

“Eyes?” Simple again. Blue.

Next, queries of a more offensive kind.

“Are you a polygamist?”

He could answer that. Decidedly no. One wife would be ample—provided she had red-gold hair, brown-gold eyes, the right kind of mouth, and a dimple. Whatever doubts there might be in his mind on other points, on that one he had none whatever.

“Have you ever been in prison?” Not yet.

And then a very difficult one. “Are you a lunatic?”

Jimmy hesitated. The ink dried on his pen. He was wondering.

— P. G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (p. 62)