She was a thin, lonely child with huge eyes & an extensive vocabulary of French foul language. Amongst the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in Dinard in 1926
- leading their privileged lives of secure routine pleasures
- Flora was a ten-year-old misfit. Ignored by her self-absorbed parents, unloved, & pitied by the pleasant, stylish people in Brittany that summer, Flora was
- peripherally
- included in their gracious circles. & there, meeting kindly civilised people for the first time, she fell in love
- with Cosmo
- with Hubert
- with Felix. It took forty years for the love affairs to be explored, consummated, & finally resolved.