Purposes of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

switches; the Night Sister, putting out lights. The noise came nearer, rebounding from the narrow thin walls of the passage.
    “Who’s that in the bathroom?”
    A wet hand gripped Vivian’s wrist.
    “Who’s there?”
    Colonna had drawn breath when a dutiful voice from the next bathroom said, “Nurse Price, Sister. I’ve got late leave.” The feet went hollowly on.
    “Had fun?” said Colonna. She had one hand behind her head, and floated herself on the other elbow.
    “Lovely.” Vivian rested a knee on the edge of the bath. Her escape did not impress her much. She was still in a mood not contained within the hospital frame, and did not reflect that a second-year, having a bath in the dark after hours, had caught her climbing in at a window. The gloom of the place had thinned to her dark-accustomed eyes, and the lightly-muscled shape blurred with shadows of water pleased her as coolly as the birch outside. She had never seen Colonna before out of her obliterating uniform. Her hair was fair and thickly curling and cut like a Greek’s.
    “A penny?” Her voice floated with the steam in the moonlight, vague and faintly warm.
    The most relevant answer Vivian could fish up was, “My brother’s brought me a dancing faun.”
    “Show me.” Colonna turned over, silver runnels glittering down her side.
    “I left it behind. I thought I’d break it climbing in.” She had thought too that Mic liked it and that it made the flat look less bare, and that its newness would be something to look forward to tomorrow. She was beginning to be very sleepy; but Colonna’s unexpected beauty gave her a remote delight. Her lips moved, uncertainly quoting Marlowe.
    “What?”
    “Something you reminded me of in Edward the Second, but I can’t remember it properly.” She rubbed her eyes. “‘Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,’—something-or-other about his ‘wreathed arms …’”
    There was a moment of darkness where Colonna’s eyelids had been. Then they came down again; the water closed over her throat.
    “You run along to bed, my beautiful. This bath’s getting cold.”
    “Sleep well,” said Vivian. She let herself out. Colonna drifted back into the night’s perspective, a metal fountain-girl in the lead of a garden pool.
    The moon was bright enough to undress by, and to see about the room. The glass bowl shone with a submerged glimmer. She put off till tomorrow morning deciding what would have to go to make way for the faun.
    “One of us can leave it at the Lodge for you,” Jan had suggested. Mic had looked up and said in his most neutral voice, “Will it be safe there?”
    “Probably not. All kinds of things get slammed down. I’d better come here for it, I expect.”
    “I would.” He added, “I’ll have the pictures up by then.”
    Jan had brought her back. He looked puzzled when she steered him away from the main entrance.
    “It’s late. I’ll have to get in at a window.”
    “Why? When ought you to have been in?”
    “Ten, and it’s a quarter to eleven now.”
    They stood in the shadow of the wall, a spot generally used by the wardmaids and their young men.
    “You puzzle me,” said Jan. “I wonder what you get out of this.”
    “Get? Has no one ever told you nursing’s a vocation?”
    “Don’t be absurd. You’ve as much vocation for nursing as I have for punching cows.”
    “Well, I suppose I like to think I’m satisfying my personal needs in a way that isn’t entirely useless to the community.”
    “Of course. But what personal needs?”
    Vivian wondered, as she undressed, what she would have said if it had not seemed needless to tell Jan anything. But she was too sleepy for definitions. Jan’s voice was getting disjointed in her mind’s ear. “Not money for instance. Or a career. Or even sensation. … Some sort of discipline. … The monastic rhythm. … Yet you don’t submit to it.”
    Vivian slipped into bed. Her reply mingled in her head with the fantasies of