There was a noisy rush of water from the bathroom, and she appeared, ready for the evening, a smile she had… — Alfred Hayes

I didn't, I thought, really like her, for really she wasn't the sort of girl to whom I was usually attracted. I'd always thought that the girls who appealed to me most were the rather energetic, rather vigorous, rather healthy girls I saw on the tennis courts or on the beach. The girls who swam well, and whose skins were beautifully tanned, and who had broad shoulders. The girls who looked well in white. The girls with clear, straightforward eyes. The girls who laughed a great deal.

I'd always thought I preferred a girl like that, and it was only an unfortunate set of circumstances which prevented me from meeting one.

Alone; it was the one active passion I had left now, the only real obsession. I had acquired, I hoped, with the passage of the years, the bad years, a measure of patience, and I thought of myself as being somewhat tight-mouthed, and even persevering, virtues I had always so conspicuously lacked, and I thought the time was at last gone when I had exhausted myself with futile rebellions. The rebellions seemed now, from this cool distance, this slight eminence I had achieved, silly and wasteful, and it was cunning that now struck me as the valuable quality to have, the distinctive characteristic. There had been so much blind impetuosity in the past; there had been so many indiscriminate wounds inflicted; I had lacerated myself as well as others so unhappily so many times. Now I fought, or it seemed to me I was fighting, a much sounder although a much more limited and more circumspect war: it consisted mostly of careful withdrawals, of very conscious retreats.

Did she know what it was for a man to come to that point in his life when he found it impossible to touch the body of his own wife? To look at it; and to feel nothing. Not to desire it, at all, when the flesh was inert and dead and meaningless? To have the act of love become (with one's own wife) the most meaningless of all acts?