He lives by his own rules and is always on the lookout for a new female conquest, whom he attempts to seduce with "a little tea, a little chat".

His life continues in this manner until he meets Barbara, a thirty-two-year-old good-looking woman who is very much his match.

A reviewer in Kirkus Review found little of interest in the book: "Only the most fanatical followers of this author will be able to label it good to the last drop, other less biased will discover as vicious a portraiture of contemporary types as can be imagined.

It is a world in which the possibility of reform or revolution has been destroyed, leaving idealists to act out an often unself-conscious hypocrisy.

Stead's interest in "man alive" leads her to stunningly original subject matter; her account of the black market in New York during World War II in A Little Tea, a Little Chat (1948), for example, has no historical parallel.