This prefeminist comedy of manners centers on the love relationships involving two families: the Marshes, an unpretentious and democratically inclined city clan with small-town ties, and the Hubbards, Chicago elitists characterized by an extremely repressive social ethic. In a book that was a critical and commercial success when it was first published in 1903, Edith Wyatt shows how women's roles were moving away from an exclusive concern with family life, marriage, and children. She compares and contrasts manners of the city and the country, of old money and new, of men and women, of lovers and courtships, and of the conventions of romantic fiction. Wyatt was praised by William Dean Howells as among the best of the Chicago school writers for the way she dealt with life in Chicago and in the downstate Illinois community she called Centreville. He also found her comparable to Jane Austen as a satirist of social manners.