nning to wind her
head up again. She did not care about the crowds.

"No, he wasn't there," said Mrs. Poppit, determined to have no
embroidery in her story, however much other people, especially Miss
Mapp, decorated remarkable incidents till you hardly recognized them.
"He wasn't there. I daresay something had unexpectedly detained him,
though I shouldn't wonder if before long we all saw him. For I noticed
in the evening paper which I was reading on the way down here, after I
had seen the King, that he was going to stay with Lord Ardingly for this
very next week-end. And what's the station for Ardingly Park if it isn't
Tilling? Though it's quite a private visit, I feel convinced that the
right and proper thing for me to do is to be at the station, or, at any
rate, just outside, with my Order on. I shall not claim acquaintance
with him, or anything of that kind," said Mrs. Poppit, fingering her
Order; "but after my reception to-day at the Palace, nothing can be more
likely than that His Majesty might mention--quite casually, of
course--to the Prince that he had just given a decoration to Mrs. Poppit
of Tilling. And it would make me feel very awkward to think that that
had happened, and I was not somewhere about to make my curtsy."

"Oh, Mamma, may I stand by you, or behind you?" asked Isabel, completely
dazzled by the splendour of this prospect and prancing about the
lawn....

This was quite awful: it was as bad as, if not worse than, the
historically disastrous remark about super-tax, and a general rigidity,
as of some partial cataleptic seizure, froze Mrs. Poppit's guests,
rendering them, like incomplete Marconi installations, capable of
receiving, but not of transmitting. They received these impressions,
they also continued (mechanically) to receive more chocolates and
sandwiches, and such refreshments as remained on the buffet; but no one
could intervene and stop Mrs. Poppit from exposing herself further. One
reason for this, of course, as already indicated, was that they all
longed for her to expose herself as much as she possibly could, for if
there was a quality--and, indeed, there were many--on which Tilling
prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness: there were, no
doubt, in the great world with which Tilling concerned itself so little
kings and queens and dukes and Members of the Order of the British
Empire; but every Tillingite knew that he or she (particularly she) was
just as good as any of t