I usually love Sackville-West, who writes like a cross between Wharton and Waugh, but this was an awful story. Two sisters and their husbands congregate in the country. The book is mostly a contrast of the two marriages and a dig into the psyche of one of the characters. He is a frigid, rigidly controlled man who has never had sex with his wife and loves only two things: his noble dog and his ancestral home. Various characters confront him about his lack of love and human connection in the course of this short novel, and at last his younger brother pretends he needs the dog for medical research and pretends to kill him. Then the ancestral home randomly burns down. The book suddenly ends there, without actually telling the reader what happens to the now bereft man. The whole thing feels like the author is flinging people and situations at her main character, for no purpose I could determine. ( )