Clara Celestine, schoolteacher, has come to expect little in life beyond the joys of literature and the simple pleasures of her independent life with her widowed mother. Hopes of married life were raised and dashed by one Mourillon brother. Now another appears, younger, equally austere, but showing a worrying ambition to follow his older brother overseas.
She dares to hope for a little personal happines, but is by no means sure that any male can truly be the source of it. So, for the time being, she invests herself in her pupils and teaches them the works of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and others about things they will never see and places they will never go.
The children's parents chide her - why teach our children about English monarchs? Why not tell our own story?
But why break the habit of a lifetime? Where else should she possibly be in life other than second place?
