Owen rather despised Professor Goodhue for not putting up a stiffer defense of his treasure. In the more than twenty years in which he and the man were members of the same family, the older becoming a grandfather in perfect synchrony as the younger became, repeatedly, a father, the first ten saw little respect tendered by Owen, a son-in-law exposed fully now to the shadowy, pampered role the professor played in his own household. True, in the last analysis its weight of books and eclectic, picturesque furniture rested on his intellectual labors, which had also wrested from the world a summer cottage in Truro and European travel every other year. But he seemed to dwell too much in the world of books, its conceits and fictions, to make much of a dent on this one.

In the second decade of this close acquaintance, Owen, his knowledge of the world deepened, could better appreciate his father-in-law’s sly withdrawal from the front line of family life, and the learned passion that had produced so many lectures and carefully pondered little articles, bound first in buff-colored academic quarterlies and then collected in fat, chaste volumes from the same university presses that issued the professor’s several anthologies and his critical biography of George Herbert. Those years saw little change in Eustace Goodhue, as he went from mid-life to retirement, and much change in Owen, progressing from naïve youth to experienced mid-life. They became two men roughly equal, with the companionable affection between them of any who have survived a hazardous voyage together. Owen, himself the father of two daughters, at last saw how weakened, by biology and by humanity’s village wisdom, the bond becomes: every cell in the aging father’s body yearns to pass her to another man, a man of her generation who can without taboo perform those elemental acts the cycle of generation demands.

There was in Professor Goodhue’s absent-minded complaisance something as yet dimly glimpsed by its beneficiary—the dubious pleasure taken in the sexual transactions of others, a polymorphous sharing noticeable not only at weddings, where the weeping parents and awestruck flower-girl unite to consign the bride to the connubial mysteries, but at polite adult parties where custom seats husbands and wives not together but beside the spouses of others, tempting potential confusion and exogamous trespass. Copulation, in short, is so powerful and highly prioritized an event that we take pleasure not only in our own but in that of others, even of a daughter or wife as she draws away from us into the sexual seethe. Phyllis in all her aloof beauty was a fruit with a stem more weakened than was apparent; she fell to Owen rather confoundingly, her fall resisted less than he had expected or, at some deep level, hoped.