He stood, embarrassed, expectant, waiting for her to look away or turn away so that he could feel justified in closing the door. She looked at him, in a way very much like pity, for an entire minute and he saw that something very important had gone out of the way she looked. It made him uneasy.

Then she turned her back, walked a few steps, and heard the door close and the lock turn and the chain push into place behind her. And she stood there, in the hall outside his door, waiting for the inevitable voices, just to give him every benefit. And when they came, it was as she had perceived they would be: his voice beginning, low and nervous and very fast, talking, soothing, perhaps apologizing. Then a second voice, which did not say very much, but which brought on a hurried response, unintelligible to her in the hall, just after its every few words. Margot pulled the last loose part of herself together and walked heavily down the hall, the sound of her shoes like a steady drumbeat on the floor, and out into the night.

JERRY HOWARD FANCIED HIMSELF A man about town, although that was far from what he actually was. He liked to think of himself as one of the very rich, that very special kind of self-possessed rich person who would be welcomed at any door among those of his acquaintances, at any time in the night. This night he was drunk. He had been drinking all week, in fact, because he had very little else to do until his friend returned from her European holiday. Earlier that evening he had decided that he did not want a girl; for he had made the very disconcerting discovery that girls, most girls, were beginning to bore him. He was only twenty-two and sometimes he worried about what would happen to him when he got older and found that girls still bored him. Secretly, he had certain fears of becoming a homosexual in later life, and this is what brought him away from his drinking sometimes late at night when he felt the fleeting need for having a girl. He wanted to exercise the need before it passed because he was very much afraid of what would happen to him after he lost all contact with it. And this is what brought him, once again, to Margot Payne’s door at three in the morning. And this is what caused him to pound on the door and call her name and laugh aloud at what he was doing, and hope that she would not be in. Margot opened the door.

“What do you want?”

“I want to come in.” Jerry smiled his old white smile.