THE GIRL IN HIS HOUSE
He understood one fact clearly: six years ago he would not have contemplated, much less put to action, the project he now had in mind. He would have gone resolutely, if conveniently, up the steps, rung the bell, and satisfied his doubts peremptorily. In those far-off days impulses had always been carefully looked into and constantly rejected as either unlawful or unethical. He still recognized the unlawful, but the ethical no longer disturbed his mental processes. What he purposed to do was not exactly unlawful, considering his foreknowledge, but it was decidedly unethical. The thing had a thrill in it, a spice of danger, a bit of leopard-stalking in the dark. Without appreciating the fact—or, if he did, ignoring it—Armitage had sloughed off much of the veneer of civilization and now reveled in primordial sensations.
He was going into that house, through the back way, like an ordinary porch-climber, because the method appealed to him and because, legally and morally (as he supposed), he had the right to enter in any manner he pleased.
He went on, turned down Seventy-third
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