We first meet Roger and Dorothy at the unprepossessing hour of 8 a.m. when Vera wakes them with the early morning tea. We say farewell to them, less than sixteen hours later, as they turn out the lights and go to sleep. But in between there has been more excitement than most people manage to crowd into sixteen months. Roger falls in and out of love with an actress/client of his sober accountancy business in the Temple; Dorothy half yields her heart to a lonely rubber planter. One daughter quite yields hers to a philandering painter with a watchful wife, only to find it returned, battered, but unbroken. The other achieves the (momentary) desire of her life "a Rossetti drawing.

" Their son experiences love-at-first-sight with the new neighbor over the garden wall. And, all the time, below stairs, Cook and Vera not to mention the daily help are living and loving (occasionally breaking the china) with equal zest and joie de vivre.