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She was not entirely sure just what girls had succumbed to his manly charms, but it was pretty obvious that—one— he was cheating on Elly every chance he got, and—two—he got more than a few chances.
    Nan had a good memory. She remembered a little scene at a party at Hal and Bev Cooper’s, at which time she had had the dubious privilege of watching Ted Carr lead Rita Morgan into an unoccupied bedroom, with one hand on Rita’s sashaying rump and the other plunged into her neckline. She remembered the autumn dance at the Cheshire Point Country Club, when Ted and some girl up for the weekend from New York had wandered onto the golf course looking for the nineteenth hole.
    Other times, too. Ted was sexy—there was no getting around that; the man positively oozed beddability. And Ted was persistent. He didn’t let a girl wonder what he was after.
    Right now he was making it obvious.
    But only to her. They sat playing bridge, the Haskells against the Carrs, and the game proceeded at its usual pace. Every so often Nan would look up to find Ted Carr’s eyes boring very intently into her own. He would smile, slowly, and would go on looking at her until, embarrassed without quite knowing why, she averted her gaze.
    Then, when her eyes darted back at him, he would be looking at her again. And that same slow smile would spread on his face.
    The smile was not exactly obscene. It came close, however. It said, in a nutshell, I’m Interested In Taking You To Bed And Sooner Or Later I’ll Do Just That. And there was something about Ted Carr that didn’t let you doubt the idea. If he looked at a woman long enough, and carefully enough, she would melt. She would permit him to seduce her because she accepted her seduction as inevitable.
    Then he started with the foot.
    Now, playing footsies is corny. It is corny and square and very definitely Out. If a man starts playing footsies with somebody else’s wife, she generally laughs at him.
    This was different.
    Because Ted somehow managed to do two things. He made the action a burlesque, so that it was funny instead of being corny. And at the same time he let you know that the burlesque itself was just a mask, that he really deep down inside and underneath and from the heart meant every last nudge of it, that he was playing footsies, in short, without being corny about it.
    “Two spades,” Elly Carr said.
    Nan tore her attention back to her cards. She didn’t remember the hand, or the bidding, but she had a lousy hand and there was no problem. She passed. Ted raised to four spades, the table passed around, and it was her turn, incredibly, to find an opening lead. She tossed out a singleton diamond and tried to get interested in the play of the hand.
    This did not materialize. Ted’s foot kept reminding her that he had more on his mind than bridge, and she kept losing track of things, and Elly made the contract with an overtrick, bringing in game and rubber.
    It was ridiculous, she thought. She should simply laugh the whole thing off. Exurban males made automatic passes at exurban females; it was part of the game, and the passes were rarely very serious. In Italy men pinch women on busses, not for the sexual thrill and not in an attempt to get the females into bed, but simply as an acknowledgment of their physical attractiveness. In Spain and Latin America, males say complimentary things to passing females. And, in exurbia, men makes passes at other men’s wives.
    A custom, a form of compliment, symptomatic perhaps of the rather schizoid nature of exurbanite society. Nothing more, certainly.
    Oh, yeah?
    This, she told herself firmly, was hardly the case. Ted Carr was not a perfunctory pass-tosser. He meant it all. He wanted to take her to bed, and thus he was obviously out of his mind.
    How could she possibly be interested? Oh, there had been men before Howard—that was no secret. But there had been no men since Howard and there were not going to be. She was a married woman with