The narrative follows a young woman who re-enters a vibrant urban world and becomes entangled with lovers, friends, and figures from both respectable society and the city's seamier amusements. Through episodes in restaurants, night cafés, and private libraries, competing loyalties and moral tests force her and her circle to confront ambition, desire, and the costs of pleasure. A thoughtful young man who observes social mixtures and a variety of other personalities—patrons, restaurateurs, blackmailers, and rival women—shape choices that resolve into a crisis and a sequence of reconciliations and reckonings, as personal dreams and practical compromises determine whether hope will be fulfilled.