Wales there?” asked Diva, beginning 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[52] 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.” [52] “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 them, and indeed better, being more fortunate than they in living in Tilling… And if there was a process in the world which Tilling detested, it was
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