Was not that kind of violence one pathway to intimacy? A murderer was intimate with his victim in a quite terrible way, even when physical love-making was completely absent. This was not that kind of intimacy. But in defending her and trying his best in a moment of savage rage to injure the man who had struck her, hadn't he come close to her in much the same primitively intimate way? The only difference was--he hadn't come close to her with the intention of doing her harm. But the same savage currents had flowed for an instant between them, bringing them very close. She was sitting so close to him that he could feel the warmth and yielding softness of her body through her thin summer clothes--a softness that was also a firmness, a roundness--and his temples began to pound, and a trip-hammer started up in his loins. He glanced at her quickly and saw that her eyes were shining in a very strange way. A wild kind of excitement seemed to be stirring in her. It should have given him warning, should have given him pause. It should have at least flashed across his mind that a woman can become wildly excited in the most primitive of all ways--by just the sight of two men fighting over her, willing and eager to kill for her. And even if one of the two had just struck her brutally and no longer desired her, just the fight alone.... But he did not realize that for many days. For a fortnight they were together constantly, and his admiration for her had become like a singing flame, his every instinct had whispered that he had found the one perfect woman at last, and that nothing could mar for him the perfection of her body when she came, slender and white and trembling a little, into his arms. It had not taken him long to discover that wherever Helen Lathrup went--people whispered that she went everywhere, but never in his presence had one of those whispers been heard--she stood out, was the center of all eyes. In a crowd, at concerts and recitals, in smoke-filled Beatnik-patronized expresso restaurants in the Village, on the exclusive, walled-off beaches of fashionable summer resorts there was and could be only one Helen Lathrup. And when the blow finally came and she refused even to speak to him on the phone, when he surrendered all of his masculine pride and allowed himself to become defenseless and completely at her mercy, he had not at first completely despaired, or turned against her like some sick and humiliated dog backed into a corner and forced to bite at last. He had gone on begging for her favors, for one more dinner date, one more hour alone with her, one last opportunity, however brief, to prove to her that their quarrels had been needless, and he would find a way to please her still. He had gone on pleading even when he could no longer deceive himself about her. Tormenting him gave her pleasure and she was not only the most beautiful but the cruelest woman he had ever known.