Margaret and Helen Schlegel are sisters from a well-educated European family. A series of events brings them into a relationship with the very English Wilcox family. Both families also come into contact with Leonard Bast and his wife, a couple near the lowest tier of the rigid class system. Leonard's desire for cultural and intellectual status attracts the attention of Helen. Margaret must reconcile her independent spirit with her desire for companionship...

Miss Amelia runs the town's only cafe and controls the locals through the careful distribution of her secretly brewed hooch. Her eccentric existence is threatned with the arrival of a dwarf who claims kinship and the reappearance of her rejected husband.