This novel tells the story of a master, his maid, and the irresistible ritual that binds them. Each morning the maid arrives in the master's bedroom with her cleaning paraphernalia, hoping to make this day's round of work the perfect one. Each morning, the master awakes from a half-remembered but recurring dream of knowledge and chastisement — the residue of which the maid, to her horror, finds each morning in his bed. And each day, the master can only notice the maid's failures and so must, in obedience to his "manual," administer her punishment, assuring her that it is an obligation to an ideal of a higher order that compels him, an obscure compulsion from which neither, seemingly, can escape.