Roger climbed the stairs slowly. As he reached the landing he saw that a door on the left was half open, so that he could see part of a cream wall and the end of a dressing-table littered with small feminine debris. Lust glowed in him as he thought: Rosemary will be sitting up in bed reading, in a flimsy, silk nightgown … He checked his mind, hating it. Damn it, he’d just said good-night to her husband. He walked resolutely past the door towards his own bedroom.
He pushed the door open and walked in. She lay back against pillows, not in a nightgown but in carefully cut silk pyjamas. Her dark hair was braided back behind the clear oval of her face. A book rested on the hollow of her lap; one smooth, small hand marking the place. Verse, he noticed. With the lamp-light shaded on her face, she looked no more than thirty.
She smiled at him enigmatically.
She smiled; that seraphic purity, faintly accented with malice.
Roger sat down carefully beside her. She looked at him critically.
She took his wrist and drew his face towards her own.
He let the last thread of detachment go, and drowned voluptuously in the senses.
Retiring, later, to his own bedroom, he could feel only a confused pain of loathing and disgust. Less than half an hour ago he had been championing, he remembered, the innate goodness of man. Including the goodness of sneaking in to your host’s wife’s bedroom at night.