The narrative centers on an elderly provincial gentleman whose obsessive avarice governs his household and daily routines, from strategic country hunts to the keeping of cartridges and the close scrutiny of expenses. His wife practices thrift to an extreme, melting candle-ends, mending garments and rationing water, while domestic servants and their children bear the practical consequences. Episodes of minute domestic detail, from kitchen and laundry scenes to comical economizing, reveal tensions, small humiliations and the persistence of social pretensions in a modest manor. The tone mixes dry comedy and gentle social critique as it follows household rituals and the emotional strain produced by parsimony.