On a moonlit lake in Italy, Susy and Nick Lansing seem to have won the impossible: a honeymoon of beauty, wit, and borrowed luxury, sustained by improvisation and the dangerous hope that love can outlast money. But beneath the glamour runs a sharper current—one shaped by debt, reputation, social ambition, and the uneasy freedom of two people who know they are living on borrowed time. As Susy remembers how she came to value Nick, the novel traces their bond from secret attraction and emotional honesty to a daring, practical marriage founded on desire, irony, and mutual understanding. In shabby rooms, lively country houses, and polished drawing rooms, they test the meaning of comfort, success, and independence, while the wealthy world around them presses in with jealousy, expectation, and opportunity. Susy's growing self-possession, and Nick's melancholy drift through his own future, reveal a relationship both exhilarating and fragile. Elegant, unsentimental, and sharply observed, this is a story of marriage as experiment, freedom as risk, and the hidden cost of wanting a life that feels truly one's own. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.