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Returning from a two-day absence, Henry goes to visit Catherine. His description of her hospital shows him to be a person of some artistic sensitivity. (You\'ll learn later that he was a student of architecture before he went to war.) He doesn\'t like the white marble busts that line the hospital walls, he tells us, and that bleak image of dead statuary will be repeated, tragically, at the end of the book. In his rambling thoughts Henry also tells of his ambivalent attitude toward the war. He stands a little apart from it, but he\'s undeniably involved. He thinks it\'s \"theatrical\" to wear a steel helmet in town, but unlike Rinaldi he is enough of a soldier to carry the required officer\'s side arm, though it embarrasses him.
Then Catherine appears. The two speak very formally in the presence of an orderly, but as soon as they are alone Catherine becomes waspish. Henry has been away for three days without sending her any word. \"Where have you been?\" she grills him. \"You couldn\'t have sent me a note?\" Is she jealous? Suspicious? Or is she thinking of the way her last lover failed to return? A certain desperation in her words leads you to believe the last.
Henry, at this stage, is willing to say anything to advance his erotic flirtation. \"I love you,\" he lies. Even as he\'s kissing Catherine he thinks she\'s a little crazy, but she\'s certainly better than one of the trollops in the officers\' brothel. Once again he sees the whole romance as a game, this time bridge, but where \"you said things instead of playing cards.\" But it doesn\'t bother him at the moment.
Then, just as he\'s certain the strange, lovely girl is willing to be seduced, she brings him up short when she acknowledges that she\'s acting, too.
\"This is a rotten game we play, isn\'t it?\" Catherine asks. To save face as much as for any other reason, Henry feels he has to insist that he truly loves her, but she knows he\'s lying.
They kiss again.
On his way home, Henry passes the Villa Rossa, where \"it was still going on.\" What is \"it\"? The same empty game of false emotions that he and Catherine had spent most of their evening playing but which Catherine\'s honesty showed a promise--or perhaps, for Henry, a threat--of ending. Back in the room, Rinaldi senses Henry\'s puzzlement over Catherine, and irritates him by saying that the Villa Rossa had been very instructive that night. Rinaldi thanks heaven that he didn\'t get involved with someone as complicated as the British nurse.
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