A circle of affluent idlers forms an exclusive New York club where conversation substitutes for action, and the narrative interweaves their urbane evenings with the darker story of Sadoul, a cynical, itinerant intellectual who becomes obsessively infatuated with a withdrawn young stenographer. The plot traces his increasingly destructive attempts to possess her as he moves between Parisian and Manhattan milieus, while the book examines themes of disillusionment after the war, the art world's vanity, the corrosive effects of talk over work, and moral ambiguity in characters who are entertainingly brilliant yet morally compromised.