The narrative traces the years of a family marked by social aspiration and unsettled domestic choices. It opens in London with a small household where a fair, fragile woman known by a pet name navigates marriage to a handsome but unreliable man and raises a child who spends long hours watching the street from a cramped nursery window. Flashbacks show the woman's origins in a provincial island family and the impulsive courtship that took her away. The story examines how vanity, economic pressures, and shifting social manners shape the household's fortunes and relationships, following the consequences of earlier decisions across time and contrasting city life with former country hopes.