In her brother’s room, in the year past, Owen would move away from one of their tussles on the edge of intercourse and look out the dormer window, to the dizzy jut and recession of Cambridge rooftops and the narrow back yards with their rusty barbecue grills on little brick patios or added-on decks, and feel its communal force, its collective pride. He was privileged to have this elevated access to its wooden cityscape—so many barny mansions built on an industry of thoughts and scholarship. Via one of its maidens he had secured himself a place here, a seat at the Goodhues’ mahogany dining table with its diet of dry gossip and liberal indignation, in these days of evil Joe McCarthy and lackadaisical Ike. Yet Owen felt less than fully part of it—he was practical, Phyllis had sensed from the start, and, compared with her father, coarse. There was an ethos expressed by these dormered rooftops, these innumerable golden windows admitting views of stuffed bookshelves, of faded Oriental rugs, of kitchens adorned with copper-bottomed pots and quilted potholders, of bathrooms papered in New Yorker covers, of narrow, unmade student beds: he could admire it, even marry into it, but never make it his own. Tall and wiry, he had a smile quick to expose the crooked, sensitive teeth of a boy reared far from this self-cherishing village.