A leisurely chronicle, which views with a detached discernment the dissolution and deterioration of the family, and a sizeable commercial empire, through the eyes of Kenneth Menzies. From his first friendship with the Dunseith twins, Judd and Bud, at boarding school, to his introduction and inclusion in the family affairs at Dunseith Acres, a baronial establishment in Vancouver, Kenneth's early romantic attachment to this family, and to the social distinction it represented, died hard. In love with Bunty, the only girl, capricious, unstable, unfaithful, he married her only to see his marriage disintegrate through Bunty's abandoned, aggressive adulteries. There is also the death of Robbie Dunseith in the war; the camouflage of Laird's homosexuality; Judd's dimming failure as he pursues a faded intellectualism, until some years after the war Kenneth's severance from the family is a final one...An obituary to a class, to traditions which did not withstand the times, and to a relationship which outlived its validity, recorded with restraint.