[4] The novel follows al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad as the head of his household; his wife, Amina; his sons, Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal, and his daughters, Khadija and Aisha.

Fahmy, Amina's elder son, is a law student, who is heavily involved in the nationalist movement against the British occupation; he also pines for his neighbor, Maryam, but cannot bring himself to take any action.

Major elements of the plot include al-Sayyid Ahmad's philandering, Yasin's cultivation of the same hobbies, Fahmy's refusal to cease his political activities despite his father's order, and the day-to-day stresses of living in the Abd al-Jawad house, in which the wife and children must delicately negotiate certain issues of sexual chastity and comportment that cannot be discussed openly.

When al-Sayyid Ahmad goes on a business trip to Port Said for a few days, Amina's children convince her to take the opportunity to leave the house and go to pray at Al-Hussein Mosque.

On the way back, Amina faints in the road due to the heat and is glancingly struck by a car, and fractures her collarbone; her children must fetch a doctor to come and set the bone.

Negotiations for the engagement commence while Amina is in exile from the house; al-Sayyid Ahmad's desire to inform his wife of the arrangement contributes to his decision to bring her home.

The wedding also fulfills the fears of Khadija in that her younger sister is the first to marry, but the removal of Aisha from the Abd al-Jawad household actually ends the long-running jealousy between them.

During the party, she openly consumes wine, and when she is drunk, she broadly hints to the crowd of this past relationship, and scandalously confronts al-Sayyid Ahmad to express her unhappiness at his taking up with a younger competing singer—the one whom Yasin saw at his lover's house shortly before.

Yasin takes the opportunity to explain to Fahmy all that he has seen at the singers' house, revealing to his emotionally naïve younger brother the truth of their father's hedonism.

As a result of Yasin's behavior, al-Sayyid Ahmad decides to marry him off to the daughter of an old friend, in hopes of finding an appropriate sexual outlet for him and keeping him from further trouble.