Anne and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage and a charming house. They are content, complete, absorbed in their private idyll. Arabella, who comes to stay one lazy summer, is rich, rootless and amoral - and, as they find out, beautiful and loving. With her elegant prose the aurthor traces the web of love and desire that entangles these three; but it is Arabella who finally loses out. Elizabeth Jane Howard reveals with devastating accuracy a situation both shattering and destructive.