We meet the Radlett family engaged in one of its happiest pursuits - Lord Alconleigh hunts his daughters with bloodhounds.

The Radlett girls (with cousin Fanny and friend Polly) begin to take their first steps into Society and in pursuit of Love. Of them all, only Lady Polly seems to have no interest in the latter.

Engagements to be married come about for good and bad reasons - and some are more approved of than others.

We are reminded that it is not only the younger generation which has amorous ambitions. Lady Polly finally chooses her mate, to the astonishment of the fashionable world and the horrified disbelief of her mother.

Lord Alconleigh's fondest memories of youth are of slaughtering Germans with an entrenching tool in the course of hand-to-hand warfare, and he has no greater fondness for foreigners of other nations. Thus it is that he lacks enthusiasm for welcoming the non-English into the heart of his own family...

Linda Radlett, after abandoning first her husband and child, next her Communist lover, Christian, falls in love for the last time - with a French duke whom she meets while in tears and sitting on a suitcase in a Paris railway station.

With the coming of War, the Radlett daughters have re-assembled in the family home, where there is a surprising arrival from overseas. The series ends in deaths - one of them unexpected.