Martha Quest is a passionate and intelligent young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood to marriage. She is a romantic idealist in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct bared to experience. For her, this is a time of solidarity reading, daydreams, dancing—and the first disturbing encounters with sex.