ress it) with his sister the Contessa di Faraglione at Capri. That
Contessa Faraglione was rather a mythical personage to Miss Mapp's mind:
she was certainly not in a mediaeval copy of "Who's Who?" which was the
only accessible handbook in matters relating to noble and notable
personages, and though Miss Mapp would not have taken an oath that she
did not exist, she saw no strong reason for supposing that she did.
Certainly she had never been to Tilling, which was strange as her
brother lived there, and there was nothing but her brother's allusions
to certify her. About Mrs. Poppit now: had she gone to see Mr. Wyse or
had she gone to the dentist? One or other it must be, for apart from
them that particular street contained nobody who counted, and at the
bottom it simply conducted you out into the uneventful country. Mrs.
Poppit was all dressed up, and she would never walk in the country in
such a costume. It would do either for Mr. Wyse or the dentist, for she
was the sort of woman who would like to appear grand in the dentist's
chair, so that he might be shy of hurting such a fine lady. Then again,
Mrs. Poppit had wonderful teeth, almost too good to be true, and before
now she had asked who lived at that pretty little house just round the
corner, as if to show that she didn't know where the dentist lived! Or
had she found out by some underhand means that Mr. Wyse had come back,
and had gone to call on him and give him the first news of the duel,
and talk to him about Scotland? Very likely they had neither of them
been to Scotland at all: they conspired to say that they had been to
Scotland and stayed at shooting-lodges (keepers' lodges more likely) in
order to impress Tilling with their magnificence....

Miss Mapp sat down on the central-heating pipes in her window, and fell
into one of her reconstructive musings. Partly, if Mr. Wyse was back, it
was well just to run over his record; partly she wanted to divert her
mind from the two houses just below, that of Major Benjy on the one side
and that of Captain Puffin on the other, which contained the key to the
great, insoluble mystery, from conjecture as to which she wanted to
obtain relief. Mr. Wyse, anyhow, would serve as a mild opiate, for she
had never lost an angry interest in him. Though he was for eight months
of the year, or thereabouts, in Tilling, he was never, for a single
hour, _of_ Tilling. He did not exactly invest himself with an air of
condescension and supe