With a delicate sense of tragedy and serene lucidity, Rachel Mackenzie, the late fiction editor of the New Yorker, tells the story of the Henderson sisters of Pliny Falls, New York, during the early decades of the twentieth century. Not unlike the characters in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle, Martha and Esther Henderson are drawn with an acute sense of perception, courage, and irony which encompasses humanity.