Written in the form of a journal with inserted letters, the story begins in early 1913, with the narrator, David Halliday (a Cambridge Classics graduate, aged 22, working on a fellowship thesis on Theocritus) holidaying happily alone in the Lake District.

A former college friend, Hugh Fawcett, now in the Foreign Office, warns David that Philip will drain him of emotional vitality.

At dinner in Cambridge with his Supervisor, Mr Dodgson, and his wife, David meets the youngest sister of Mrs D., Margaret Osborne, 25, a young woman who has just "perpetrated" a first novel, The Crystal Cabinet ("oh, quite shocking, my dear").

The pair steal night meetings on the moors (the novel "contains a scene of love in the heather above Swaledale that was considered unusually frank for 1926", recalled a colleague of Lucas's at King's).

Margaret Osborne is based on Lucas's first wife, the novelist E. B. C. Jones, Philip Winton on Sebastian Sprott (to whom the book was dedicated), Hugh Fawcett ("the best brain in the Foreign Office") on John Maynard Keynes, Mr Dodgson on Donald Robertson of the Trinity Classics department.

Jones had recently written a novel, The Wedgwood Medallion (1923, the model for The Crystal Cabinet), about a similar love-triangle, while her Inigo Sandys (1924) had been, in part, about passionate male friendships at Cambridge University.

"Squalor, foulness, utter boredom – yet at instants this strange repellent fascination, that seized me the moment I set eyes on Fricourt and Mametz and the great heave of the gaunt uplands of the Somme.

"[8] While praising the power and beauty of the scenes in Greece, several reviewers found the form of a confessional-diary with inserted love-letters improbable, and the book as a whole "young".

Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman, however, reminded them that that was the whole point,[9] and indeed the narrator, looking at his early diary entries with hindsight, admits as much.

[10] L. P. Hartley in the Saturday Review found the characters too rational and analytical: "they ask for and need no interpretation from us" and have within them "no force of unexplored, unreasoning life";[11] while Edwin Muir in The Nation and Athenaeum felt that though the narrator's thoughts were set down with passion, "the desires which colour them are never sufficiently realised".

[14] Admirers of the novel included T. E. Lawrence, who found that "Parts of the book come back to my memory without warning at odd times as I lie about brooding.

T. S. Eliot, as literary editor of Faber and Gwyer, hearing that Lucas had written a novel, wrote to him offering to look at it with a view to publication.