No, there was no question about it, she told herself with an effort to firmness, it was too dangerous to leave this book in existence. Matt was hardly the type to go prying through her private things, but if he should happen some day to discover these words, it would be all over between them. Perhaps their marriage had been a little dull sexually as far as Lynn was concerned, but Matt seemed to be satisfied and happy; and she knew that his sense of morality and decency would never permit him to live together with a woman who was capable of writing such depraved unholy words as these. The book had to be destroyed!

Nakedly, the young wife walked to the bathroom, now determined to burn the diary page by page and flush the ashes down the toilet so that her descriptions of the last orgies with Phil Agard would be gone forever and a whole shameful chapter of her life would be erased completely. She perched on the edge of the tub and balanced the diary on one naked knee with a book of matches on the other. Trying to keep her courage up, she tore out the first few pages and set them ablaze, choking a little on the thick smoke which immediately filled the bathroom and trying not to yield to the overpowering temptation to read any more of this record of degeneracy and sin. Tears running freely down her cheeks, she resolutely burned her way through the entire six months of her affair with the TV executive, keeping the book upside down so that her eyes could not accidentally pick up some stray phrase or passage which might set her off again. Then she came to the last entry, the one she had written after her last meeting with Phil, the night before she had accepted her husband's offer of marriage. She had to see it one more time and she knew that rereading what had happened between them one last time would give her the moral strength she needed to go ahead and finish the job. Her fingers trembled as she held the last remaining pages up to the bathroom light.