When Patrick McKinley steps through the window of her drawing room, Rose Seaton's fate is sealed: this flame-haired apparition in white flannels - an artist - could not be more different to her approved suitors, the lumpen sons of Yorkshire industry. But when Rose elopes with Patrick to Paris, the vie de boheme quickly loses its lustre, and when she finds herself penniless and pregnant - in an artist's colony in Cornwall - she repents her impetuous choice. Might it be that she would have been wiser to accept the hand of the rising star in her father's firm: dependable, stammering Harold Webb? Susan Barrett offers us a captivating portrait of a young woman's sentimental education, and discovery of a life beyond the gilded cage of her upbringing.