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68 Diva’s head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour.

“Hullo!” she said. “Want me?”

“May I pop up for a moment, dear?” said Miss Mapp. “That’s to say if you’re not very busy.”

“Pop away,” said Diva. She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said “pop” in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever. “I’ll tell my maid to pop down and open the door.”

While this was being done, Diva bundled her chintz curtains together and stored them and the roses she had cut out into her work-cupboard, for secrecy was an essential to the construction of these decorations. But in order to appear naturally employed, she pulled out the woollen scarf she was knitting for the autumn and winter, forgetting for the moment that the rose-madder stripe at the end on which she was now engaged was made of that fatal worsted which Miss Mapp considered to have been feloniously appropriated. That was the sort of thing Miss Mapp never forgot. Even among her sweet flowers. Her eye fell on it the moment she entered the room, and she tucked the two chintz roses more securely into her glove.

“I thought I would just pop across from the grocer’s,” she said. “What a pretty scarf, dear! That’s a lovely shade of rose-madder. Where can I have seen something like it before?”

This was clearly ironical, and had best be answered by irony. Diva was no coward.

“Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” she said.

Miss Mapp appeared to recollect, and smiled as far back as her wisdom-teeth. (Diva couldn’t do that.)

“I have it,” she said. “It was the wool I ordered at