ngle member of the Tilling Working
Club, which had knitted its fingers to the bone and made enough
seven-tailed bandages to reach to the moon, had been offered a similar
decoration. If anyone had she would have known what to do: a stinging
letter to the Prime Minister saying that she worked not with hope of
distinction, but from pure patriotism, would have certainly been Miss
Mapp's rejoinder. She actually drafted the letter, when Mrs. Poppit's
name appeared, and diligently waded through column after column of
subsequent lists, to make sure that she, the originator of the Tilling
Working Club, had not been the victim of a similar insult.

Mrs. Poppit was a climber: that was what she was, and Miss Mapp was
obliged to confess that very nimble she had been. The butler and the
motor-car (so frequently at the disposal of Mrs. Poppit's friends) and
the incessant lunches and teas had done their work; she had fed rather
than starved Tilling into submission, and Miss Mapp felt that she alone
upheld the dignity of the old families. She was positively the only old
family (and a solitary spinster at that) who had not surrendered to the
Poppits. Naturally she did not carry her staunchness to the extent, so
to speak, of a hunger-strike, for that would be singular conduct, only
worthy of suffragettes, and she partook of the Poppits' hospitality to
the fullest extent possible, but (here her principles came in) she never
returned the hospitality of the Member of the British Empire, though she
occasionally asked Isabel to her house, and abused her soundly on all
possible occasions....

This spiteful retrospect passed swiftly and smoothly through Miss Mapp's
mind, and did not in the least take off from the acuteness with which
she observed the tide in the affairs of Tilling which, after the ebb of
the night, was now flowing again, nor did it, a few minutes after
Isabel's disappearance round the corner, prevent her from hearing the
faint tinkle of the telephone in her own house. At that she started to
her feet, but paused again at the door. She had shrewd suspicions about
her servants with regard to the telephone: she was convinced (though at
present she had not been able to get any evidence on the point) that
both her cook and her parlourmaid used it for their own base purposes at
her expense, and that their friends habitually employed it for
conversation with them. And perhaps--who knows?--her housemaid was the
worst of the lot, for she