These stories, variously set for the most part in South Africa, England, and Germany between the late 19th century and the late 20th century, were written at intervals through the long life of the writer. They are concerned with love and hate, happiness and unhappiness, guilt and loneliness, faithfulness and betrayal, generational rebellion; and also with prejudice in matters of Race, Religion and Class β in every case from an unexpected angle.
The story of a wife and mother who is deeply content with her family life, believing it bound securely by faithful love, touches lightly but ominously on the precariousness of happiness. A woman, blaming the cold snobbery of her wealthy parents for her loneliness, tries but fails to find happiness through marriage into a lower class. A teenage girl tells the story of her heroic half-sister, for whose tragic fate in childhood she mistakenly blames herself.
A Jewish woman, sensitive to the prejudice against her own race, is unconscious of the fault in herself, and while imagining herself to be the subject of injustice is actually the inflictor of it.
A German who fought involuntarily for the Third Reich, finds a father-figure in an African, only for his affection to be bitterly destroyed by the revelation of the black man's implacable hatred for white men.
The last story is about a beautiful, gifted, graceful woman whose parents consider her too good to marry an ordinary man. They buy a "nobleman" for her β to the ruin of themselves and their daughter. But this story, alone of the six in the collection, has a happy ending.