"She was too restless to work or write. She thought of Richard, of her unmanageable desires and her unabateable ambitions...My life is in pieces, I am nothing, I have achieved nothing; yet I will, she thought."

In the month of the 1918 Armistice a young woman, Hervey Russell, comes to London to seek her fortune. Inexperienced and poor, she has all the dreams of youth. Hervey is alone, her husband in the Air Force still, her baby son in Yorkshire. She plunges into the social and political ferment of London life with her friends T.S. and Philip, her slovenly neighbour Delia, and her lover, the American Jess Gage. This is the beginning of Hervey's story...