On a sweltering June afternoon, Arthur Craddock, a middle-aged art critic with refined tastes and rueful appetites, arrives at his friend Philip Wroughton's riverside house. Thorley Weir, with its ancient weir breaking the Thames into silver, provides the backdrop for a day that will expose every hidden current of the heart. Craddock has come for two things: to secure a magnificent Reynolds portrait for his collection, and to bask in the presence of Joyce, Philip's young and radiant daughter. But desire is a treacherous guide. As the heat intensifies and afternoon fades toward evening, Craddock must confront the gap between appreciating beauty and possessing it, between the man he is and the man he once imagined himself to be. E.F. Benson, writing at the height of his powers, constructs a psychological portrait of startling honesty: a man who understands his own follies but cannot escape them, who mistakes acquisition for love and finds that the Reynolds and the girl alike will slip through his fingers. It is a novel about the precise, painful geometry of wanting what you cannot have.
