After various travails, the adult Alice and Virginia Madden move to London and renew their friendship with Rhoda, an unmarried bluestocking.

She is living with the also unmarried Mary Barfoot, and together they run an establishment teaching secretarial skills to young middle-class women remaindered in the marriage equation.

Married Monica meets Bevis, a young, middle-class man who pursues her and represents for her the romantic ideal from popular novels.

This is reported back to Widdowson, and he feels his suspicion has been justified and informs Mary Barfoot of her cousin's blackguardly ways.

After Widdowson confronts Monica over her infidelity, she leaves him but lives at his expense and even moves, together with her sisters, to his rented house in Clevedon.

To salve her conscience, she visits Rhoda and shows her a love letter from Bevis and also exonerates Everard over the alleged affair.

Even though Rhoda assures him that she believes him innocent, she refuses his proposal, intimating that in his professions of love he was "not quite serious," but was partially testing her principles.