Back in Middle Falls, in the ’seventies, the path to illicit sex had grown shorter; the skids were greased. The scent upon Owen had ripened, the scent that told women he was in the market for what only they could provide. Not every man was. Some in Middle Falls were more interested in the next drink than in the next woman—Jock Dunham had been like that. Some, like Ed Mervine, put their passion into their work—the machinery, the payroll, the bottom line, the buccaneering of chancy enterprise in a fertile but mined field. Certain husbands, of whom Henry Slade appeared to be one, were simply too dry, too stiff, too consumed by the drab business of earning a living and husbanding his property, to play the love game. His bureaucratic post in Hartford, in one of those colorless marble boxes that sprawl around the spiky, turreted basilica of a capitol building, with a gold dome as narrow as the band at the top of a pencil, defined him and fulfilled him, so that what he brought to the social life of Middle Falls was a mere residue, compared with his wife’s many involvements. Not that Henry was absent at weekend get-togethers; on the contrary, he was, with Vanessa, at every cocktail party and Heron Pond kiddy swim meet and informal picnic and formal benefit dance. He gave no sign, save a dry chuckle, of enjoying social life, or of not enjoying it. He smoked a pipe and nodded as he listened, seldom replying with more than a word or two, knocking out his pipe or pinching his lips together, with shifty sideways motions of his eyes before granting that word. He gave the impression of hesitating between brands or flavors of wisdom within his capacious available store; after over a decade of acquaintanceship Owen decided that Henry instead of silently wise was stupefied by years of meticulous drudgery in the service of Connecticut’s most picayune regulations. He was a swarthy man, not tall; he walked as if a board were keeping his back straight, thrusting his pipe and head forward while he plodded along, like a villager under a load of fagots.