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 overpainting her face. Nurse Kettle asked her briskly 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 Kettie’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.