London, in the uneasy years after the Great War. Peter Mainwaring is young, thoughtful, and quietly in love with Nellie Heaton, who is engaged to another man. Theirs is the particular agony of modern youth: to stand on the precipice of life and find the world below them hollow, to feel deeply in a time that has made feeling suspect. Benson captures the suffocating boredom of drawing-room conversation, the way middle-aged adults drone on about nothing while the young suffocate on questions that have no answers. Peter watches Nellie prepare to marry a man she does not love, and he says nothing, because what is there to say? The war took everything except this lingering, formless dread. This is a novel about the silence between people who understand each other perfectly, and the cowardice that passes for kindness. It is also a portrait of a generation asked to rebuild a world they no longer believe in.
