Nurse Kettle was dying for a good cup of tea, and what was more, she had a bone to pick with Kitty Cartarette. She accepted and presently was seated before the table.

“You pour out,” Kitty said. “Help yourself.”

She looked exhausted and had made the mistake of over-painting her face. Nurse Kettle asked her briefly if she had had any sleep.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “doped myself up to the eyebrows last night, but you don’t feel so good after it, do you?”

“You certainly do not. You want to be careful about that sort of thing, you know, dear.”

“Ah, what the hell!” Kitty said impatiently and lit a cigarette at the stub of her old one. Her hands shook. She burnt her finger and swore distractedly.

“Now, then,” Nurse Kettle said making an unwilling concession to the prompting of her professional conscience. “Steady.” And thinking it might help Kitty to talk, she asked, “What have you been doing with yourself all day, I wonder?”

“Doing? God, I don’t know. This morning for my sins I had to go over to Lacklanders’.”

Nurse Kettle found this statement deeply offensive in two ways. Kitty had commonly referred to the Lacklanders as if they were shopkeepers. She had also suggested that they were bores.

“To Nunspardon?” Nurse Kettle said with refinement. “What a lovely old home it is! A show place if ever there was one,” and she sipped her tea.

“The place is all right,” Kitty muttered under her breath.

This scarcely veiled slight upon the Lacklanders angered Nurse Kettle still further. She began to wish that she had not accepted tea from Kitty. She replaced her cucumber sandwich on her plate and her cup and saucer on the table.

“Perhaps,” she said, ’’you prefer Uplands.”

Kitty stared at her. “Uplands?” she repeated, and after a moment’s consideration she asked without any great display of interest, “Here! what are you getting at?”

“I thought,” Nurse Kettle said with mounting colour, “you might find the company at Uplands more to your taste than the company at Nunspardon.”

“Geoff Syce?” Kitty gave a short laugh. “God, that old bit of wreckage! Have a heart!”

Nurse Kettle’s face was scarlet. “If the Commander isn’t the man he used to be,” she said, “I wonder whose fault it is.”

“His own, I should think,” Kitty said indifferently.

“Personally, I’ve found it’s more often a case of cherchez,” Nurse Kettle said carefully, “la femme.”

“What?”

“When a nice man takes to solitary drinking, it’s generally because some woman’s let him down.”

Kitty looked at her guest with the momentarily deflected interest of a bitter preoccupation. “Are you suggesting I’m the woman in this case?” she asked.

“I’m not suggesting anything. But you knew him out in the East, I believe?” Nurse Kettle added with a spurious air of making polite conversation.

“Oh, yes,” Kitty agreed contemptuously. “I knew him all right. Did he tell you? Here, what has he told you?” she demanded, and unexpectedly there was a note of something like desperation in her voice.

“Nothing, I’m sure, that you could take exception to; the Commander, whatever you like to say, is a gentleman.”

“How can you be such a fool,” Kitty said drearily.

“Well, really!”

“Don’t talk to me about gentlemen. I’ve had them, thank you. If you ask me, it’s a case of the higher you go the fewer. Look,” Kitty said with savagery, “at George Lacklander.”

“Tell me this,” Nurse Kettle cried out; “did he love you?”

“Lacklander?”

“No.” She swallowed and with dignity corrected Kitty, “I was referring to the Commander.”

“You talk like a kid. Love!”

“Honestly!”

“Look!” Kitty said. “You don’t know anything. Face it; you don’t know a single damn’ thing. You haven’t got a clue.”

“Well, I must say! You can’t train for nursing, I’ll have you know—”

“O, well, all right. O.K. From that point of view. But from my point of view, honestly, you have no idea.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about,” Nurse Kettle said in a worried voice.

“I bet you don’t.”

“The Commander—” She stopped short and Kitty stared at her incredulously.

“Do I see,” Kitty asked, “what I think I see! You don’t tell me you and Geoff Syce — God, that’s funny!”

Words, phrases, whole speeches suddenly began to pour out of Nurse Kettle. She had been hurt in the most sensitive part of her emotional anatomy, and her reflex action was surprising. She scarcely knew herself what she said. Every word she uttered was spoken in defence of something that she would have been unable to define. It is possible that Nurse Kettle, made vulnerable by her feeling for Commander Syce — a feeling that in her cooler moments she would have classed as “unsuitable”—found in Kitty Cartarette’s contempt an implicit threat to what Lady Lacklander had called her belief in degree. In Kitty, over-painted, knowledgeable, fantastically “not-quite,” Nurse Kettle felt the sting of implied criticism. It was as if, by her very existence, Kitty Cartarette challenged the hierarchy that was Nurse Kettle’s symbol of perfection.

“—so you’ve no business,” she heard herself saying, “you’ve no business to be where you are and behave the way you’re behaving. I don’t care what’s happened. I don’t care how he felt about you in Singapore or wherever it was. That was his business. I don’t care.”

Kitty had listened to this tirade without making any sign that she thought it exceptional. Indeed, she scarcely seemed to give it her whole attention but snuffed it with an air of brooding discontent. When at last Nurse Kettle ran out of words and breath, Kitty turned and stared abstractedly at her.

“I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,” she said. “Is he game to marry you?”

Nurse Kettle felt dreadful. “I wish I hadn’t said anything,” she muttered. “I’m going.”

“I suppose he might like the idea of being dry-nursed. You’ve nothing to moan about. Suppose I was friends with him in Singapore? What of it? Go right ahead. Mix in with the bloody county and I hope you enjoy yourself.”

“Don’t talk about them like that,” Nurse Kettle shouted.

“Don’t do it! You know nothing about them. You’re ignorant. I always say they’re the salt of the earth.”

“Do you!” With methodical care Kitty moved the tea-tray aside as if it prevented her in some way from getting at Nurse Kettle. “Listen,” she continued, holding the edges of the table and leaning forward, “listen to me. I asked you to come and sit here because I’ve got to talk and I thought you might be partly human. I didn’t know you were a yes-girl to this gang of fossils. God! You make me sick! What have they got, except money and snob-value, that you haven’t got?”

“Lots,” Nurse Kettle declaimed stoutly.

“Like hell they have! No, listen. Listen! O.K., I lived with your boy-friend in Singapore. He was bloody dull, but I was in a bit of a jam and it suited us both. O.K., he introduced me to Maurice. O.K., he did it like they do: ‘Look what I’ve found,’ and sailed away in his great big boat and got the shock of his life when he came home and found me next door as Mrs. Maurice Cartarette. So what does he do? He couldn’t care less what happened to me, of course, but could he be just ordinary-friendly and give me a leg up with these survivals from the ice-age? Not he! He shies off as if I was a nasty smell and takes to the bottle. Not that he wasn’t pretty expert at that before.”

Nurse Kettle made as if to rise, but Kitty stopped her with a sharp gesture. “Stay where you are,” she said. “I’m talking. So here I was. Married to a — I don’t know what — the sort they call a nice chap. Too damn’ nice for me. I’d never have pulled it off with him in Singapore if it hadn’t been he was lonely and missing Rose. He couldn’t bear not to have Rose somewhere about. He was a real baby, though, about other women: more like a mother’s darling than an experienced man. You had to laugh sometimes. He wasn’t my cup of tea, but I was down to it, and anyway, his sort owed me something.”