the jealousy, the madness of
envy which it would raise in all properly-constituted breasts.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about
all her friends, in spite, too, of her restless activities, Miss Mapp
was not, as might have been expected, a lady of lean and emaciated
appearance. She was tall and portly, with plump hands, a broad,
benignant face and dimpled, well-nourished cheeks. An acute observer
might have detected a danger warning in the sidelong glances of her
rather bulgy eyes, and in a certain tightness at the corners of her
expansive mouth, which boded ill for any who came within snapping
distance, but to a more superficial view she was a rollicking,
good-natured figure of a woman. Her mode of address, too, bore out this
misleading impression: nothing, for instance, could have been more
genial just now than her telephone voice to Isabel Poppit, or her smile
to Withers, even while she so strongly suspected her of using the
telephone for her own base purposes, and as she passed along the High
Street, she showered little smiles and bows on acquaintances and
friends. She markedly drew back her lips in speaking, being in no way
ashamed of her long white teeth, and wore a practically perpetual smile
when there was the least chance of being under observation. Though at
sermon time on Sunday, as has been already remarked, she greedily noted
the weaknesses and errors of which those twenty minutes was so
rewardingly full, she sat all the time with down-dropped eyes and a
pretty sacred smile on her lips, and now, when she spied on the other
side of the street the figure of the vicar, she tripped slantingly
across the road to him, as if by the move of a knight at chess, looking
everywhere else, and only perceiving him with glad surprise at the very
last moment. He was a great frequenter of tea parties and except in Lent
an assiduous player of bridge, for a clergyman's duties, so he very
properly held, were not confined to visiting the poor and exhorting the
sinner. He should be a man of the world, and enter into the pleasures of
his prosperous parishioners, as well as into the trials of the
troubled. Being an accomplished card-player he entered not only into
their pleasures but their pockets, and there was no lady of Tilling who
was not pleased to have Mr. Bartlett for a partner. His winnings, so he
said, he gave annually to charitable objects, though whether the
charities he selected began a