Free Nurse Linnet's Release by Averil Ives Page B

fancy and wild exaggerations did not allow it to go to her head. All the same, when she was ready at last, and examining her own reflection in the mirror, she couldn’t help feeling pleased with it.
    She looked rather like the heart of a china rose herself with her flawless skin, the exquisite delicacy of her small features, and her crushed violet eyes. Although if anyone had suggested to her that they resembled crushed violets she would have been merely amused. Her hair was like a dark and shining cap enclosing her small head, and those delicate feathers of fringe lay like the ends of an ostrich plume on her white forehead.
    “Ready, Angel?” Cathie burst in on her, and waited for the other’s reaction at the full splendour of her in the sea-green brocade. She really looked quite spectacular, and Linnet felt certain Pat Murphey would enjoy his evening.
    The two men called for them in a taxi. Linnet felt shy in the company of two members of the opposite sex who were more or less complete strangers to her, but she couldn’t fail to recognize the fact that Roger Sherringham betrayed instant symptoms of looking as if he were quite certain he was going to enjoy his evening.
    “Where have you been all my life?” he inquired seriously, as soon as they left the taxi. “And why didn’t I see more of you when you were at St. Faith’s?”
    Linnet resorted to the triteness of the reply that fine feathers make fine birds, and although he agreed with her that there was something in that, it was such a microscopic “something” in her case that she still felt flattered.
    The dance floor was packed, and Linnet recognized amongst some of the elegant females who preferred to take refuge on the edge of it the wives of Sir Paul L o ring and his opposite number, the Senior Surgical Registrar. Lady Loring had not been Lady Loring very long, and she was much younger than her husband, and very finished and poised and perfect. Sister Helen Wortley, who was St. Faith’s particular pin-up beauty—so beautiful in fact that she would have had instant success on the films—was there dancing with the Head of the Pathology Department, and lively little Sister Maureen O’Connor was whirling round in the arms of a man everyone had been expecting her to marry for years, one Barry Richardson, who was thinking of launching out in General Practice.
    Linnet enjoyed her dances with Roger, and she also danced several times with Pat Murphey; but when Roger tried to inveigle her into one of the discreetly arranged sitting-out alcoves, where it was possible to draw the curtains and remain shut off from the rest of the room—apart from the noise of it, of course, and the music—she very firmly opposed the idea. He looked at her a little ruefully, but with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes.
    “Not even if we don’t draw the curtains?”
    She shook her head, and he thought what a noticeably firm little white chin she had, in spite of her gentle eyes.
    “All right,” he said, “I’ll get you something to drink.”
    While he was foraging for food and drink for them both Linnet became aware of someone very tall who appeared, suddenly at her elbow.
    “Good evening Nurse,” said Dr. Shane Willoughby.
    Linnet looked up at him. He seemed very distinguished in his evening things, she thought, and she did wish his eyes weren’t quite so blue, because she agreed with Diana Carey that when one looked into them unexpectedly it was like feeling oneself suddenly engulfed in blue water, and she found it extraordinarily difficult to look away.
    “I don’t think I really ought to address you as nurse, you know,” he said. “You much more closely resemble something out of fairyland, in fact rather less substantial than a sprite, I’m inclined to believe. Or I could liken you to a piece of Dresden china, couldn’t I?”
    “You could,” she answered, her eyes laughing up at him, “if you really feel like allowing your imagination flights of that