“Exactly,” Owen agrees. He loves Brad, as a golfer. When he looks at him he sees not his soul, as God is said to, nor the statistics of his income and net worth, as the tax authorities hope to discern, but a certain swing, a kind of twirling motion with the fingers held too near the end of the grip, a dainty yet determined swing which, on good days, delivers drives down the middle, sometimes sneaky long, and tosses up chips that creep marvellously close to the hole. The men of Owen’s acquaintance in Haskells Crossing and its environs are to him an array of golf swings, no two alike: staid Morton Burnham a powerful but too-upright lunge with an ineradicable head-bob; loose-jointed Geoffrey Dillingham an exaggerated shoulder-turn, the club flung back way past parallel; stout Quentin Chute a trigger-quick hand-punch, all forearms and grimace; fussy Martin Scofield an agitated, overintellectual set-up, the feet shuffling to widen and narrow, close and open the stance while the club is insecurely gripped and regripped, a mis-hit increasingly certain; serious-minded Gavin Rust a rather comical last-second squat, after a series of solemn waggles with locked knees; careful Caleb Eppes a superslow take-back, like the Tin Man after a night of rain; excitable Corey Cogswell an incorrigible look-up and a subsequent hail of curses upon himself, with an aborted club-toss; and so on. Owen’s male friends are ninety percent swings to him; he knows almost nothing of their professional activities, or the religious convictions that frame their sense of well-being, or the erotic adventures that have brought them to their present domestic situations. Most, in fact, are still married to the girls they had married in the ’fifties. Most have a sinusoid New England accent and the playful regional reticence, perfected through generations of close dealing, as New England’s proportional share of the national wealth dwindled. Owen’s ignorance of these natives, however, is partly willful; their seeming blankness is something within him, a lockout of input. He is not interested in them because, as Julia has pointed out, he does not covet their wives. Their wives are twittering biddies, haggard rasping former debutantes, perky, mannerly, and as finely fitted to this society as the parts of a well-milled machine. In Middle Falls, on the outer rim of a greater metropolitan area, none of the women had quite fit; all wanted something different, though it was hard to say what, hard even for them. A widespread discontent had filled the town with an erratic, rueful energy not unlike that of Owen’s mother. He had grown up breathing an atmosphere on the edge of blow-up; female revolt, rumbling in the romantic comedies showing at the Scheherazade, threatened the peace of his grandfather’s house. While his fiery-haired mother had lacked the resources for striking out toward freedom, the women of the ’sixties and ’seventies were less constrained. Fresh on the Pill, barred by early marriage and motherhood from the wild party—love-beads and bell-bottoms, crash pads and rock concerts, acid and pot—that they could hear on the other side of the generational wall, the women of Middle Falls were restless, wry, and lovable.