“Shimmering and lithely transgressive”

That summer morning, in the distance, Daisy Meyer bent her blond head over her club, a short iron for the short sixth hole, in effortless concentration on her practice swing. Still engrossed in her projected shot, and seemingly oblivious to the murmurings of the women on the porch, she walked over to the ball, addressed it, and crisply shot it off. For a moment the vision was fixed, motionless, beyond time—left leg straight, right knee bent, arms, shoulders, hips following through, ball suspended in flight—before the breeze stirred the leaves of the elms, her body unfolded, and the ball descended in its slow arc to the green, where it rolled to within a few feet of the cup, as, far across the fairways, the river began to flow again in the sunlight, catching it, and sending it back in sharp, dazzling beams of light.

—The opening paragraph of William McPherson’s Testing the Current, a coming-of-age novel set in a small Midwestern town in the late 1930s. If there isn’t a better case for letting women become members of The Augusta National Golf Club we haven’t read it (yes we know they let two women in last year, but one of them was Condoleezza Rice so we don’t count it).