"In 1900 Rebecca West was an eight-year-old girl living on the outskirts of London. Of that year, she remembers the aged Queen Victoria--a little bundle of black clothes propped up in an open horse-drawn carriage--and the ragged march down her suburban street that celebrated the relief of Mafeking in the far-off Boer War. This was a time when European empires covered much of the world, when North America was seen as a land of innocence and vast, untainted...

In these four brilliant short novels set in America, England and Paris, Rebecca West explores the lives and relationships of rich women and men who are ruled by "the harsh voice we hear when money talks, or hate." There is Josie, a flower of American girlhood whose boundless ambition for wealth fatally loosens the bonds of her marriage to Corrie. There is Etienne de Sevenac, a dilettante French aristocrat whose courtly stratagems are no match for...