ous in its
effects. General unpopularity might be needed to teach Miss Poppit not
to trespass on Grandmamma Mapp's preserves.

Isabel Poppit lived with a flashy and condescending mother just round
the corner beyond the gardener's cottage, and opposite the west end of
the church. They were comparatively new inhabitants of Tilling, having
settled here only two or three years ago, and Tilling had not yet quite
ceased to regard them as rather suspicious characters. Suspicion
smouldered, though it blazed no longer. They were certainly rich, and
Miss Mapp suspected them of being profiteers. They kept a butler, of
whom they were both in considerable awe, who used almost to shrug his
shoulders when Mrs. Poppit gave him an order: they kept a motor-car to
which Mrs. Poppit was apt to allude more frequently than would have
been natural if she had always been accustomed to one, and they went to
Switzerland for a month every winter and to Scotland "for the
shooting-season," as Mrs. Poppit terribly remarked, every summer. This
all looked very black, and though Isabel conformed to the manners of
Tilling in doing household shopping every morning with her wicker
basket, and buying damaged fruit for fool, and in dressing in the
original home-made manner indicated by good breeding and narrow incomes,
Miss Mapp was sadly afraid that these habits were not the outcome of
chaste and instinctive simplicity, but of the ambition to be received by
the old families of Tilling as one of them. But what did a true
Tillingite want with a butler and a motor-car? And if these were not
sufficient to cast grave doubts on the sincerity of the inhabitants of
"Ye Smalle House," there was still very vivid in Miss Mapp's mind that
dreadful moment, undimmed by the years that had passed over it, when
Mrs. Poppit broke the silence at an altogether too sumptuous lunch by
asking Mrs. Plaistow if she did not find the super-tax a grievous burden
on "our little incomes." ... Miss Mapp had drawn in her breath sharply,
as if in pain, and after a few gasps turned the conversation.... Worst
of all, perhaps, because more recent, was the fact that Mrs. Poppit had
just received the dignity of the M.B.E., or Member of the Order of the
British Empire, and put it on her cards too, as if to keep the scandal
alive. Her services in connection with the Tilling hospital had been
entirely confined to putting her motor-car at its disposal when she did
not want it herself, and not a si