Purposes of Love by Mary Renault

down beside her and gathered her into a brief, violent embrace. In spite of its furious abruptness his touch was certain, even familiar, and she yielded to it without consenting pause. He kissed her again, this time painfully, and let her go. They opened their eyes on one another, left in deeper darkness by the dazzle of the fusing flame: bewildered strangers.
    Mic was smiling remotely; a queer, elated, wondering smile. There was something in it of discovery, of defiance, of release. Vivian saw it, and did not interpret it. She only saw its strangeness, and it made her afraid.
    Suddenly, with a bright objective clarity, she saw herself as she had been sitting in the minutes before he kissed her. Her blurred disregarded knowledge of her own body reassembling, the image crystallising as if in a stranger’s eyes, she could see her own short beech-brown hair and straight firm jaw; her intent and distant face; her hands, big for a woman’s and roughened with soap and antiseptics, clasped in front of her as she sat forward, elbows on knees, in a familiar pose. It was a pose characteristic; but not of herself.
    “Mic!” She sprang to her feet, away from him. There was no doubt in her mind. He had struggled too hard, against himself and her, to make it plain. That he had tried to warn her and that she had been too vain, too pleased with her own interpretation of him, to understand, was the heaviest notch in the score. What had she, hot steel or cold, that would cut deep enough? She had returned his kiss, and would have returned it again.
    “That was a pity,” she said. Good; her voice held, stretched and hard. He was still half-lying in the chair, propped on his elbow towards the place where she had been, looking up at her, his smile changing. “It isn’t even new—did you think so—except in blatancy.” (How easy it was to think of such long words, its ease surprised her.) “But you’re rather more aware of yourself than the others. That removes the last excuse.”
    “What do you mean?” said Mic. He was still a little short of breath.
    “Are you asking me to tell you?”
    Mic picked himself up out of the chair, and with a mechanical movement shook out the squashed cushion on which they had lain. Then he said, in a small colourless voice, “That may have been true. It isn’t any more. You don’t give me credit for much decency, do you?”
    “No. But I gave you credit for a certain amount of honesty, till now.”
    Her throat was tightening, her chest grew heavy. With shame and horror she felt the approach of tears—of shock, partly, and nervous strain, with, somewhere behind it all, a bitter sense of loss. She looked away from Mic, in the childish fancy that she was less visible when she could not see.
    Mic murmured to himself, “Oh, God.”
    “I’m sorry”—she turned on him savagely—“to upset you. I forgot you’re not accustomed to women.”
    “That didn’t sound like you,” said Mic quietly.
    The fight went out of Vivian; only devastation remained. She sat down in the other chair, and covered her face. She could hear Mic move up to her and stand, afraid to touch her.
    “Oh, Mic, how could you?” she sobbed. “We were so nice together.”
    “We’ll be nicer than ever,” said Mic unevenly. “Only don’t cry.”
    She shook her head. Mic knelt beside her and tried to dry her eyes with his handkerchief; repeating, as if to a child, “Come on, my dear, don’t, please don’t; look, it’s all right now.”
    “It will never be all right,” said Vivian in a swallowed voice. As she spoke she held up her face for him to dry; it seemed irrelevant, and natural. Presently she stopped crying, and Mic put his handkerchief away.
    “Vivian,” he said, choosing his words stiffly and carefully, “it’s hard to ask you to forgive me, because what you think isn’t true. And it’s hard to defend myself, because it has been. I’m terribly sorry to have hurt you like this.”
    What was he saying? She