He was feeling exalted and talkative like football players in the dressing room after a game.

This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it⁠—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven⁠—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.