The chain of consequences, therefore, of Lucia’s remaining at Mallards was far-reaching. Miss Mapp took Wasters for another month at a slightly lower rent, Diva extended her lease of Taormina, and Irene still occupied the four-roomed labourer’s cottage outside Tilling, which suited her so well, and the labourer and his family remained in the hop-picker’s shanty. It was getting chilly of nights in the shanty, and he looked forward to the time when, Adele having left the Hurst, his cottage could be restored to him. Nor did the chain of consequences end here, for Georgie could not go back to Riseholme without Foljambe, and Foljambe would not go back there and leave her Cadman, while Lucia remained at Mallards. So Isabel Poppit continued to inhabit her bungalow by the sea, and Georgie remained in Mallards Cottage. With her skin turned black with all those sun-baths, and her hair spiky and wiry with so many sea-baths, Isabel resembled a cross between a kipper and a sea-urchin.

September had been full of events. The Art Exhibition had been a great success, and quantities of the pictures had been sold. Lucia had bought Georgie’s picture of Mallards, Georgie had bought Lucia’s picture of Mallards Cottage, Mr Wyse had bought his wife’s pastel of the King of Italy, and sent it as a birthday present to Amelia, and Susan Wyse had bought her husband’s teacup and wallflower and kept them herself. But the greatest gesture of all had been Lucia’s purchase of one of Miss Mapp’s six exhibits, and this had practically forced Miss Mapp, so powerful was the suggestion hidden in it, to buy Georgie’s picture of the Landgate, which he had given her, and which she had sold (not even for her own benefit but for that of the hospital) for sixpence at her jumble sale. She had had to pay a guinea to regain what had once been hers, so that in the end the revengeful impulse which had prompted her to put it in the sixpenny tray had been cruelly expensive. But she had still felt herself to be under Lucia’s thumb in the whole matter of the exhibition (as indeed she was) and this purchase was of the nature of a propitiatory act. They had met one morning at the show, and Lucia had looked long at this sketch of Georgie’s and then, looking long at Elizabeth, she had said it was one of the most charming and exquisite of his watercolours. Inwardly raging, yet somehow impotent to resist, Elizabeth had forked up. But she was now busily persuading herself that this purchase had something to do with the hospital, and that she need not make any further contributions to its funds this year: she felt there was a very good chance of persuading herself about this. No one had bought quaint Irene’s pictures, and she had turned the women wrestlers into men.