Then forth she went for the usual shoppings and chats in the High Street and put in some further fine work. The morning tide was already on the ebb, but by swift flirtings this way and that she managed to have a word with most of those who were coming to her po-di-mu tomorrow, and interlarded all she said to them with brilliant scraps of Italian. She just caught the Wyses as they were getting back into the Royce and said how molto amabile it was of them to give her the gran’ piacere of seeing the Contessa next evening: indeed she would be a welcome guest, and it would be another gran’ piacere to talk la bella lingua again. Georgie, alas, would not be there for he was un po’ ammalato, and was going to spend a settimana by the mare per stabilirsi. Never had she been so fluent and idiomatic, and she accepted with mille grazie Susan’s invitation to dine the evening after her music and renew the conversations to which she so much looked forward. She got almost tipsy with Italian… Then she flew across the street to tell the curate that she was going to shut herself up all afternoon in order to get the Bach fugue more worthy of his critical ear, she told Diva to come early to her party in order that they might have a little chat first, and she just managed by a flute-like ‘Cooee’ to arrest Elizabeth as she was on the very doorstep of Wasters. With glee she learned that Elizabeth was entertaining the Padre and his wife and Major Benjy to dinner before she brought them on to her party, and then, remembering the trap which that woman had laid for her and Georgie over the Italian paper-knife, she could not refrain from asking her to dine and play bridge on the third night of her coming illness. Of course she would be obliged to put her off, and that would be about square… This half hour’s active work produced the impression that, however little pleasure Tilling anticipated from tomorrow’s po-di-mu, the musician herself looked forward to it enormously, and was thirsting to talk Italian.