During Oliver's absence Lucy is pursued by Jeffrey, a Dartmouth College undergraduate they have hired to be a companion for Tony.

Lucy's deliberate act of infidelity and betrayal leads to the disintegration of her marriage and complete estrangement from her son.

Before leaving for combat in Europe, a despondent Oliver attempts to explain his frustrations and unhappiness to his son: ″You reach a certain age, say twenty-five, thirty, it varies with your intelligence, and you begin to say, “Oh, Christ, this is for nothing.

I used to have a high opinion of myself... and then, in fifteen minutes in a little stinking summer resort beside a lake, the whole thing collapsed.″ A decade after the war is over, Lucy (now aged 60) visits Paris and unexpectedly encounters her son.

Rather, he encounters this passage in The Winter’s Tale (1623): Should all despair,... That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind Would hang themselves.

Among their objections were that the plot was less than credible, the characters underdeveloped and the subject matter mundane compared with the social issues Shaw had treated in his earlier writing.

[9]Also coloring the critics' assessment was the growing perception that Shaw had chosen to sacrifice literary acclaim for commercial success, and had retreated from the idealistic left-wing sentiments expressed in his earliest work.

Fueling this concern, prior to publication Shaw was paid $400,000 for the screen rights while the novel was still in a pre-published manuscript by Hecht-Lancaster Productions.

[10][11] Critic James Kelly in the Saturday Review noted that the novel tackles moral dilemmas such as whether an intelligent woman should allow herself to be stifled by her husband; whether adultery is a form of rebellion; and whether a child should be forced to bear the full price of a parent's infidelity.