‘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 –’

‘Oh, well, all right. OK. 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 ‘Notquite,’ 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 suffered 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.