Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

Wodehouse’s line uses a comic, vivid metaphor to describe the way misfortune can be prepared long before it lands. A boxing glove suggests a blow that is painful but within the normal rules of the game; “slipping lead” into it turns the hit into something covertly rigged and far more damaging. By personifying Fate as a quiet cheat working “unseen in the background,” the sentence captures the feeling that life’s worst reversals are not merely bad luck but a kind of stacked deck—events aligning against someone while they remain oblivious. The humor lies in the exaggerated criminality of Fate’s behavior, a characteristic Wodehouse move that lightens a bleak idea through playful imagery.