To a tourist travelling through, one New England town looks much like another—white spire, green common, struggling little downtown—but they have considerable economic and spiritual differences, and their citizens know what they are. Frank and Ann had, after a six-month struggle with real-estate agents, moved to a town where the property lines were marked by walls and hedges and No Trespassing signs. The friends they slowly made were generally older than they, a number of them widowed or retired. The lives, the winterized summer houses, the grounds maintained by lawn services were all in a state of finish. The town they had moved from had been a work in progress, with crooked streets laid out by Puritan footsteps and boundary lines marked by lost boulders and legendary trees whose stumps had rotted to nothing. The young householders had tried to do their own maintenance, leaving ladders leaning against porch roofs and two sides of a house unpainted until next summer. The yards were hard-used by packs of children; there was a constant coming and going of Saturday-afternoon tennis or touch football turning into drinks before everyone rushed home to shower and shave for that night’s dinner party. You lived in other people’s houses as much as you could; there was an ache to being in your own, a nagging unsuppressible suspicion that happiness was elsewhere. Driving back from taking the babysitter home, Frank would pass darkened houses where husbands he knew were lying in bed, head to murmuring head, with wives he coveted.

Out of this weave of promiscuous friendship, this confusedly domestic scrimmage, Maggie had emerged, touching his hip with hers as they stood side by side at a lawn party’s busy, linen-clad bar, or exclaiming, in an involuntary, almost fainting little-girl voice, “Oh, don’t go!” when he and Ann stood up at last to leave a dinner party that she and Sam had given. And when, at one of the suburban balls with which the needs of charity dotted the calendar, his turn came to dance with Maggie, they nestled as close as the sanction of alcohol allowed, and at the end she gave his hand a sharp, stern, quite sober squeeze. It took very clear signals to burn through his fog of shyness and connubial inertia, but she had enough expertise to know that, once ignited, he would blaze.