"Dropped, after an isolated childhood, into a complex, pressing world of people, Portia Quayne soon finds herself betrayed through the affections that are to her most natural, through her love for Eddie (in which she is at once child and woman) and through her need for family love from the unknown relatives she must learn to know. But the "heart" that is seen as threatened in this novel, the heart that sometimes seems to be dying, is not simply the...