Susan has high hopes of her American trip. Shy and studious at Oxford, she felt herself always on the outside of things there. Surely everything will be different at Radcliffe College, where she has a year's fellowship. But in New England she is lonelier than ever. Her tutorials with glamorous Professor Winter soon become the high points of her week, but when their intellectual cut and thrust leads on to passion, she finds herself in uncharted waters, risking shipwreck among the strict conventions of 1930's Boston society.