The microbes devoured the chlorides in the earth; as metabolic byproducts, they produced toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). By the time the infestation was contained an area of nearly 30 square kilometers had been effectively turned into a toxic waste dump.

The trousers need to be shortened.

A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom.

Among the adherents of the new radicalism, the Freedom Party of 1970 was viewed as more a vehicle for criticism of the Labor regime (which the town-based Freedomites saw as an assault by the formerly powerless rural poor upon their citadel of privilege) than a catalyst for systemic change.