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responsibility,”
    Dittany suggested. “Mrs. James seems to be awfully big on civic responsibility, she’s always spouting off about it in the Scottsbeck Sentinel. Maybe we could gently suggest that we’ll send his picture to the paper. Of course the Jameses don’t exactly live in Lobelia Falls, but Polly’s over here all the time lately, asking Mr. Glunck dumb questions about the artifacts at the museum and having soulful chats with Arethusa.”
    “Which of them does the chatting?” asked Zilla.
    “Polly does, naturally. Arethusa just sits there looking like a Burne Jones painting and letting him think she’s listening. Little does he reck that she’s actually entertaining lustful fantasies about snaffling all the pickled onions next time she invites herself to supper at our house.”
    The “little does he reck” came easily to Dittany’s lips.
    During her pre-Osbert period and even occasionally after her marriage while still in the pre-twin phase, she’d typed manuscripts for Osbert’s aunt. Roguish Regency romance was Arethusa Monk’s all-too-fertile field of fictional fabrication.
    Not only rich and famous, the authoress was also possessed of a magnificent head of jet-black hair and eyes like fathomless pools of mystery; hence she was always being fallen in love with by somebody or other. Since her own two loves were her work and her meals, she often failed to notice who belonged to whichever heart was being laid before her feet at any specific point in time.
    Mrs. Pollicot James, as she liked to be known, seemed to be fairly important in provincial garden-club circles.
    Recently, she’d invited members of the Gruband-Stake Gardening and Roving Club to tea at her more or less palatial house just over the line in Scottsbeck. This could have been merely a hands-across-the-border gesture, or it could have been a preliminary softening up in the hope of getting the Lobelia Falls group to do all the dog work at the upcoming spring flower show. It might also have had something to do with the fact that the Gruband-Stakers had inherited a rundown Victorian house, turned it into the by now lavishly endowed and increasingly acclaimed Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum, and thus boosted their organization to a level of civic responsibility that even Mrs. James would have been hard put to snoot.
    Dittany had missed Mrs. James’s tea on account of the twins, but of course she’d heard all about it. No Mr. James the elder had been present. He was said to have departed this earth some years ago and probably wouldn’t have been caught dead at his wife’s hen party anyway. Mr.
    James the younger, however, had been right there with bells on. Pollicot hadn’t seemed to mind a bit being the only male present. He’d mingled freely with the company until Arethusa Monk had shown up rather late, firmly escorted by a somewhat tight-lipped Dot Coskoff and muttering darkly of abduction.
    To any discerning female eye, it must have been clear that Arethusa had forgotten all about the tea until Dot showed up to collect her and that she had been forced to dress in an almighty rush. Usually a model of elegance, Arethusa had on this occasion displayed that sweet disorder in her dress whose effect Robert Herrick had so accurately assessed some three centuries previously. Thus also had been kindled a certain wantonness in the bosom of a middle-aged bachelor who’d been kept all his life under the heavy thumb and the eagle eye of a domineering mother.
    Nor had the siren’s allure worn off. Pollicot James was still lugging along his tributes of flowers and candy with monotonous regularity. For Arethusa to beguile him into an afternoon’s worth of free waterwitching ought to be a piece of cake. Dittany said so and her hearers agreed, all but the littlest two. Ditson Renfrew (named for Dittany’s late father and Osbert’s favorite literary hero) and Dittany Anne (named for her mother and Dittany Senior’s favorite literary heroine)