She looked down at her legs. She had fine legs, shapely legs, and she had a good body too, a damned good body, but all that she had been able to do was unleash a savage lust in him and now that lust had been turned elsewhere. If she'd known the truth about him at the beginning she wouldn't have allowed him to touch her. She'd have--yes, scratched his eyes out. She felt degraded, soiled, and the band of despair and bitter anger she'd felt on leaving the night club continued to tighten about her heart. She'd ask to be taken home. She'd demand that he tell the driver to continue on to the Village. If he thought for one moment she'd go to his apartment now and spend the rest of the night with him he was a fool as well as an amorous opportunist with nothing but concealed evil in his soul. Concealed? That was good. He hadn't made any attempt to conceal it on the dance floor, hadn't cared how much he hurt her or made her feel ignored, rejected, degraded. And he had dared to call it a good evening, had dared to pretend that she hadn't noticed, or would be broad-minded enough to dismiss what he'd done as meaningless, just a light flirtation that could be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders. For all his brazen disloyalty and the progress he'd made with Lathrup in one short hour he didn't know enough about how a sensitive, completely devoted woman would feel about such behavior to make him anything but a clod at heart, a miserable excuse for a lover whom no woman in her right mind would look at twice. What was wrong with Lathrup? Couldn't she see what kind of man he was? Hadn't she even suspected the truth about him? If she'd taken him away from a completely unattractive woman, some ugly-looking strumpet or a vicious nag, it would have been easy enough to find excuses for him and to think of him as romantic and misunderstood. But couldn't she see that he was a switch artist, and a very clumsy one at that, drawn to a new face like a moth to a flame? The more she thought about it the more she became choked with fury. She found herself unable to say a word, even when the cab turned west on Thirty-fourth Street and continued on toward his apartment. He spoke again then, and there was a kind of pleading tenderness in his voice. "Let's pretend it didn't happen," he said. "I was pretty tight, I guess. And I swear to you I didn't make a deliberate play for her. Believe me, I didn't. That dance production was her idea--" She turned on him, her eyes blazing. "What a stupid, conceited thing to say! Production is good. It certainly was that. If you'd been dancing naked together you couldn't have made more of a spectacle of yourselves." "She's a very attractive woman and I'm only human, darling. Sometimes you seem to forget that." "That's the oldest male excuse in the world. But just let a woman use it--and see how far she gets."