tried to unfreeze Miss Mapp, who, when all was said and done, was
the centre of the Tilling circle, and who, if any attempt was made to
shove her out towards the circumference, always gravitated back again.
And now, on these important errands she was Miss Mapp's accredited
ambassador, and all the terrible business of the opening of the
store-cupboard and her decoration as M.B.E. was quite forgiven and
forgotten. There would be so much walking to be done from house to
house, that it was impossible to wear her sable coat unless she had the
Royce to take her about....

The effect of her communications would have surprised anybody who did
not know Tilling. A less subtle society, when assured from a first-hand,
authoritative source that a report which it had entirely refused to
believe was false, would have prided itself on its perspicacity, and
said that it had laughed at such an idea, as soon as ever it heard it,
as being palpably (look at Miss Mapp!) untrue. Not so Tilling. The very
fact that, by the mouth of her ambassador, she so uncompromisingly
denied it, was precisely why Tilling began to wonder if there was not
something in it, and from wondering if there was not something in it,
surged to the conclusion that there certainly was. Diva, for instance,
the moment she was told that Elizabeth (for Mrs. Poppit remembered her
Christian name perfectly) utterly and scornfully denied the truth of the
report, became intensely thoughtful.

"Say there's nothing in it?" she observed. "Can't understand that."

At that moment Diva's telephone bell rang, and she hurried out and in.

"Party at Elizabeth's on Wednesday," she said. "She saw me laughing. Why
ask me?"

Mrs. Poppit was full of her sacred mission.

"To show how little she minds your laughing," she suggested.

"As if it wasn't true, then. Seems like that. Wants us to think it's not
true."

"She was very earnest about it," said the ambassador.

Diva got up, and tripped over the outlying skirts of Mrs. Poppit's fur
coat as she went to ring the bell.

"Sorry," she said. "Take it off and have a chat. Tea's coming. Muffins!"

"Oh, no, thanks!" said Mrs. Poppit. "I've so many calls to make."

"What? Similar calls?" asked Diva. "Wait ten minutes. Tea, Janet.
Quickly."

She whirled round the room once or twice, all corrugated with
perplexity, beginning telegraphic sentences, and not finishing them:
"Says it's not true--laughs at notion of--And Mr. Wyse believes--The