At that moment Diva's telephone bell rang, and she hurried out and in.
“Party at Elizabeth’s on Wednesday,” she said. “She saw me laughing. Why ask me?”
Mrs. Poppit was full of her sacred mission.
“To show how little she minds your laughing,” she suggested.
“As if it wasn’t true, then. Seems like that. Wants us to think it’s not true.”
“She was very earnest about it,” said the ambassador.
Diva got up, and tripped over the outlying skirts of Mrs. Poppit’s fur coat as she went to ring the bell.
“Sorry,” she said. “Take it off and have a chat. Tea’s coming. Muffins!”
“Oh, no, thanks!” said Mrs. Poppit. “I’ve so many calls to make.”
“What? Similar calls?” asked Diva. “Wait ten minutes. Tea, Janet. Quickly.”
She whirled round the room once or twice, all corrugated with perplexity, beginning telegraphic sentences, and not finishing them: “Says it’s not true—laughs at notion of—And Mr. Wyse believes—The Padre believed. After all, the Major—Little cock-sparrow Captain Puffin—Or t’other way round, do you think?—No other explanation, you know—Might have been blood—”
She buried her teeth in a muffin.
“Believe there’s something in it,” she summed up.
She observed her guest had neither tea nor muffin.
“Help yourself,” she said. “Want to worry this out.”
“Elizabeth absolutely denies it,” said Mrs. Poppit. “Her eyes were full of—”
“Oh, anything,” said Diva. “Rubbed them. Or pepper if it was at lunch. That’s no evidence.”
