The setting of the story is 1960s “Swinging London”. Agnes Cullinan, having been a lonely child, brings into her early adulthood a lingering need for love and companionship, and a longing for release from social constraint. She marries, in defiance of her parents’ wishes, the bohemian Bello Goldman, hoping to experience a grand romance, but finds she cannot rid herself of the natural endowment of a critical mind. Her struggle and failure to live his kind of life brings her eventually to some self-understanding.
