Shallcross Manor faces Flushing Bay in the Borough of Queens in 1960. At age 32, Sophie came back to live in the family mansion. She had been in a sanitorium due to depression for three years and is trying to restart her life. The Shallcross family, for three hundred years members of New York Society, and of Jay Livingston, a product of the world of profit of the 1960's. The Shallcrosses live in uncertain affluence in their fading ancestral home on Long Island. To them it embodies the heritage to which they cling; to Jay the ground on which it stands represents the bedrock of a potential real estate fortune.
