However, when Poppy Carew's boyfriend leaves her, and her father dies, she is forced to make a decision and to learn how to deal with life on her own.

Poppy lost her mother when she was a baby and in her childhood her father, a gambler, would often be away from home to attend to his business on the racetracks.

The death of someone and/or a funeral often form the background of Wesley's story and triggers off the plot; the characters are then faced with a new situation which they have to adjust to.

In The Vacillations of Poppy Carew the cook-stable girl, Mary Mowbray, leaves for Spain shortly after having had an affair with her employer, Fergus Furnival.

When the same Furnival many months later by chance runs into Mary, she has a baby in tow, but refuses to speak of her year in Spain.

No doubt[citation needed] Wesley's inclination to return to the subject of the uncertainty of fatherhood originates from an experience in her own "wild" youth.