Her seventeen-year-old daughter Barbary Deniston (Helen left her first husband, an English barrister) and her fifteen-year-old step-son Raoul Michel have run wild, associating with the Maquis, helping a guerrilla band with schemes of sabotage and harassing the Germans.

When he returns to England, Helen sends Barbary back with him to live in London with their father, Sir Gulliver Deniston KC, and to attend the Slade School of Art.

Poetic descriptions of the past and present of the City of London and its ruined churches are intertwined with Barbary's moral and religious confusion.

On a family holiday to the Scottish Highlands, staying with an uncle who is a leading psychiatrist, Barbary becomes alarmed by his wish to question her, steals money from her aunt, and runs away back to London.

[1] In their article on Macaulay in the Dictionary of National Biography, Constance Babington Smith and Katherine Mullin say "The World My Wilderness (1950) showed that new depths of pity had transmuted her satirical approach.