Page:Miss Mapp.djvu/96

92 won’t you perhaps cover some of them up, or turn them to the wall? We should all be looking at your pictures instead of attending to our cards. And if you were thinking of asking the Padre, you know.…”

They were approaching the corner of the room where the screen stood, when a movement there as if Adam had hit it with his elbow made Miss Mapp turn round. The screen fell flat on the ground and within a yard of her stood Mr. Hopkins, the proprietor of the fish-shop just up the street. Often and often had Miss Mapp had pleasant little conversations with him, with a view to bringing down the price of flounders. He had little bathing-drawers on.…

“Hullo, Hopkins, are you ready?” said Irene. “You know Miss Mapp, don't you?”

Miss Mapp had not imagined that Time and Eternity combined could hold so embarrassing a moment. She did not know where to look, but wherever she looked, it should not be at Hopkins. But (wherever she looked) she could not be unaware that Hopkins raised his large bare arm and touched the place where his cap would have been, if he had had one.

“Good-morning, Hopkins,” she said. “Well, Irene darling, I must be trotting, and leave you to your—” she hardly knew what to call it&#8203;—&#8203;“to your work.”

She tripped from the room, which seemed to be entirely full of unclothed limbs, and redder than one of Mr. Hopkins’s boiled lobsters hurried down the street. She felt that she could never face him again, but would be obliged to go to the establishment in the High Street where Irene dealt, when it was fish she wanted from a fish-shop.… Her head was in a whirl at the brazenness of mankind, especially womankind. How had Irene started the