This novella depicts with subtle realism the reactions within Old New York society to the scandalous affair of Mrs. Lizzie Hazeldean. The tale opens in the residence of the Parrett family as they watch a fire in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The blaze forces the hotel's occupants outside the building, and the family is shocked to see Mrs. Hazeldean exit with a well-to-do bachelor, Henry Prest. Most of the story, however, recounts Lizzie's past and the causes leading to her affair. The narrator, a young boy during the New Year's Day fire and now a young man, recounts how as a young woman Lizzie had been left to depend on others after her father, a rector, was professionally ruined by rumors of illicit relations with female parishioners. Taken in by an unwilling aunt, she soon escaped by marrying a respectable lawyer, Charles Hazeldean. The narrator reflects on the limited options of the young Lizzie and others like her, a common theme in Wharton's work: "Among the young women now growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to picture the helpless incapacity of the pretty girl of the 'seventies, the girl without money or vocation, seemingly put into the world only to please, and unlearned in any way of maintaining herself there by her own efforts".