'He sat at the ravaged table and watched the girl dry, herself with efficient strokes, sawing between her toes and twisting her shoulders to reach the back of her thighs. This was the modem world then, this seamless logic, this silent tit-for-tat. This is what people did. He did not like it, He hated it. But he was in its moral universe now, and he could never go back.' Athena and Dexter lead a happy, family life~ sheltered from the tackier aspects of the modern world and bound by duty towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past~ and those she brings with her. In the ensuing upheaval Athena sees a way out: it leads into a world whose casual egotism she has dreamed of without being able to imagine its consequences.