In 1934 after the death of her father, Madeleine, a proper and repressed well-off housewife, invites her free-spirited sister, Dinah, to stay with her and her husband Rickie in her elegant London home. The couple have a young son, Anthony. Madeleine has always been secretly jealous and resentful of Dinah, a raffish bohemian painter, who is the despair of her conservative sister and their mother, Mrs. Burkett. Madeleine at last contrives to get Dinah engaged to a respectable, well-off man. Dinah announces her engagement at a family dinner, but later that night Rickie, who has long harbored an attraction for her, tells her to end the engagement.