The plot of the novel focused partly on a story about the effects of the degeneration of the aristocratic classes on the women who were forced to marry them for money.

At the end of the novel, the heroine, Jessamine Halliday, gives birth to a deformed still born child and afterward dies.

Brooke implies, but does not explicitly state, that the Lord who Jessamine marries might have syphilis.

[4] Brooke saw this novel and The Woman Who Did as important in trying to resolve the "Sex Question" which she thought dominated debate in the 1880s and 1890s.

[5] Brooke died at a nursing home in Weybridge, Surrey on November 28, 1926.