"After forty years, Nina Henry looked in her mirror and found there a stranger in place of herself. Her first Paris dress had transformed her from a respectable young matron into an almost indecently beautiful woman. If that's what a dress does to you, she told herself, it is all wrong. It's immoral. Her husband thought so, too. He said it had changed her - made her look like a French cocotte. And when that night she met Chalke Ewing, vacationing from his Cuban sugar ranch, Nina knew that she actually had changed - become a stranger to herself. She realized, with complete surprise, that she had never really been in love before. But despite the change, Nina could not face the situation. Possessed by the necessities of the present, she was bound by the romantic conventions of the past. Demanding all, she would sacrifice nothing. How far she is successful, and where she fails, is a dramatic record of the need for compromise, which more than any other quality, has formed the thoughts and acts of most women."