The aloof and enigmatic Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan. At a literary party she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Intoxicated by her chilly beauty, Sidney pursues the young woman with restless determination and soon proposes marriage. Constance accepts, and with some misgivings moves into his dark, book-filled apartment. But Constance is a haunted woman. When her father, a doctor, makes a devastating revelation, she is forced to revisit the childhood she spent with her dissipated sister Iris in a broken-down house on the Hudson River. Meanwhile Iris's lover, an older man who plays piano in a seedy cocktail lounge, threatens Constance's already shaky marriage, and before long her world begins to fall apart. Her only consolation is the friendship of Sidney's boy Howard, a strange, delicate child, not unlike Constance herself...
