Read Purposes of Love for Free Online

when she really wanted to call him to order she had a secret method which consisted simply in employing the word “picturesque”. It annoyed him a good deal and produced an unfailing, though transient, effect.
    They had not walked together since she started her training, and she could not at first think what was different till she found that it was her aching feet. They had become an almost unnoticed background to life, except for a rather vivid moment when she first put them down in the morning. But her stride, too long for good deportment, still went with Jan’s very well.
    They made for some Scotch firs which were the highest point on the immediate skyline, while he talked to her about Scotland, the new pendulum, and people who had amused him since they met. She knew he would not open last night’s conversation without her leave. Jan treated other people’s fences with all the punctilio he demanded for his own.
    Round about the firs the turf was short, spongy and hummocked by the rabbits of eternal years. The tiny grass was sprinkled with flowers to scale, of pinhead size. Vivian spread her raincoat for them to sit on.
    “What’s that for?” asked Jan.
    “For you, and you can sit on it and shut up. This grass is soaking. You’ll get acute rheumatism and it’ll leave you with a heart and then you won’t be able to climb hills at all. What will you do then?”
    “Shoot myself, what do you think?” Jan sat down on a corner of the mackintosh, looked round him for a few minutes, and lay back to watch the fir-branches weaving with their sea-sound against the sky. His hands were clasped behind his head, and his shoulders were settled comfortably into the glittering grass. Vivian swallowed what she had been about to say, took off her own shoes and stockings and worked her toes in among the grass-roots, dislodging sharp wet smells. The pain went from across her soles. Jan was looking with a half-smile, remotely expectant, at a space of blue in the treetops that changed its shape as the wind shifted. Neither of them spoke for five minutes or so.
    Vivian picked up a little bullet of rabbit-dung from between her toes, flicked it down the hillside, and said, “All the same, Jan, I think I shall carry on.”
    Jan rolled over on his elbow, his eyes focusing down to her slowly as a cat’s do. “Why not? You may as well complete the reaction, whatever it’s going to be.”
    “You’re right. It’s not being what I thought. But it wasn’t the monastic rhythm I came for. I can get that at home; too much of it. It’s so long since you lived there, you wouldn’t remember. I was prepared for the discipline and the routine, of course. But I came here really as a sort of test.”
    “M-m?” said Jan. He tasted a blade of grass critically and spat it out again. “Not that you were capable of holding down the work, surely? You must have known that.”
    “No, not that. As a matter of fact I rated my practical capacities a good deal higher than I’ve found them. You’ve got the usual lay idea about nursing, I see. When people have disabused themselves of the belief that it consists entirely of stroking foreheads, they always conclude that it consists entirely of emptying slops. Actually, it’s a highly technical skill, and I’ve always been a bit clumsy with my hands, you know. That’s just one of the things I didn’t bargain for.”
    “This is interesting,” said Jan. “Go on.”
    “Well I suppose my real reason for coming here or if I was just making it up was to find out whether my personality really existed or if I was just making it up.”
    Jan looked round at her. “My dear girl,” he said, “don’t make me laugh.”
    “You know what Anstice used to say—”
    “No?” He turned his face up to hers, vivid with interest. “A friend of yours? Tell me about her.”
    “Jan! You practically lived with her for a week in Germany last year.”
    “Oh. Oh, of course. Not practically, angel. Pure theory, I swear