“Yes; Tuesday morning,” said Miss Mapp. “I pay all my household books on Tuesday. Poor but honest, dear Padre. What a rush life is to-day! I hardly know which way to turn. Little duties in all directions! And you; you’re always busy! Such a busy bee!”
“Busy B? Busy Bartlett, quo’ she! Yes, I’m a busy B to-day, Mistress Mapp. Sermon all morning: choir practice at three, a baptism at six. No time for a walk to-day, let alone a bit turn at the gowf.”
Miss Mapp saw her opening, and made a busy bee line for it.
“Oh, but you should get regular exercise, Padre,” said she. “You take no care of yourself. After the choir practice now, and before the baptism, you could have a brisk walk. To please me!”
“Yes. I had meant to get a breath of air then,” said he. “But ye guid Dame Poppit has insisted that I take a wee hand at the cartes with them, the wifey and I. Prithee, shall we meet there?”
(“That makes seven without me,” thought Miss Mapp in parenthesis.) Aloud she said:
“If I can squeeze it in, Padre. I have promised dear Isabel to do my best.”
“Well, and a lassie can do no mair,” said he. “Au reservoir then.”
Miss Mapp was partly pleased, partly annoyed by the agility with which the Padre brought out her own particular joke. It was she who had brought it down to Tilling, and she felt she had an option on it at the end of every interview, if she meant (as she had done on this occasion) to bring it out. On the other hand it was gratifying to see how popular it had become. She had heard it last month when on a visit to a friend at that sweet and refined village called Riseholme. It was rather looked down on there, as not being sufficiently intellectual. But within a week of Miss Mapp’s return, Tilling rang with it, and she let it be understood that she was the original humorist.
Godiva Plaistow came whizzing along the pavement, a short, stout, breathless body who might, so thought Miss Mapp, have acted up to the full and fell associations of her Christian name without exciting the smallest curiosity on the part of the lewd. (Miss Mapp had much the same sort of figure, but her height, so she was perfectly satisfied to imagine, converted corpulence into majesty.) The swift alternation of those Dutch-looking feet gave the impression that Mrs. Plaistow was going at a prodigious speed, but they could stop revolving without any warning, and then she stood still. Just when a collision with Miss Mapp seemed imminent, she came to a dead halt.