The novel opens on a summer afternoon as two college friends, Maurice Somerville and Roger Montrose, drive through the countryside reunited after years apart. Their conversation reveals everything: Roger, worn down by a life of pleasure and adventure, feels hollow and empty. Maurice, the eternal optimist, urges his friend toward meaning through love and family. Then Mabel Lee arrives, virtuous and kind, and something awakens in both men. But the stage is set for heartbreak, for this is a novel about the way love collides with expectation and idealism meets the hard realities of the human heart. The three women of the title move through this story of passion and longing: Mabel Lee, who inspires devotion; Ruth Somerville, Maurice's sister, who watches and feels her own unnamed desires; and the absent woman Roger once pursued, whose memory haunts him still. Wilcox examines what happens when desire meets duty, when the heart wants what society deems improper, and when the idealized vision of love must confront the complicated truth of actually living it.
