r more than a minute or two....
As she crossed the narrow cobbled roadway, with the grass growing
luxuriantly between the rounded pebbles, she stumbled and recovered
herself with a swift little forward run, and the circular feet twinkled
with the rapidity of those of a thrush scudding over the lawn.

By this time Isabel Poppit had advanced as far as the fish shop three
doors below the turning down which Mrs. Plaistow had vanished. Her
prancing progress paused there for a moment, and she waited with one
knee highly elevated, like a statue of a curveting horse, before she
finally decided to pass on. But she passed no further than the fruit
shop next door, and took the three steps that elevated it from the
street in a single prance, with her Roman nose high in the air.
Presently she emerged, but with no obvious rotundity like that of a
melon projecting from her basket, so that Miss Mapp could see exactly
what she had purchased, and went back to the fish shop again. Surely she
would not put fish on the top of fruit, and even as Miss Mapp's lucid
intelligence rejected this supposition, the true solution struck her.
"Ice," she said to herself, and, sure enough, projecting from the top of
Miss Poppit's basket when she came out was an angular peak, wrapped up
in paper already wet.

Miss Poppit came up the street and Miss Mapp put up her illustrated
paper again, with the revolting picture of the Brighton sea-nymphs
turned towards the window. Peeping out behind it, she observed that Miss
Poppit's basket was apparently oozing with bright venous blood, and
felt certain that she had bought red currants. That, coupled with the
ice, made conjecture complete. She had bought red currants slightly
damaged (or they would not have oozed so speedily), in order to make
that iced red-currant fool of which she had so freely partaken at Miss
Mapp's last bridge party. That was a very scurvy trick, for iced
red-currant fool was an invention of Miss Mapp's, who, when it was
praised, said that she inherited the recipe from her grandmother. But
Miss Poppit had evidently entered the lists against Grandmamma Mapp, and
she had as evidently guessed that quite inferior fruit--fruit that was
distinctly "off," was undetectable when severely iced. Miss Mapp could
only hope that the fruit in the basket now bobbing past her window was
so much "off" that it had begun to ferment. Fermented red-currant fool
was nasty to the taste, and, if persevered in, disastr