A well-to-do, upper-class young woman, intelligent, fashionable, educated, strikingly beautiful, exploitative, selfish, and haughty, a despiser of men as she knows them, taking them all as manipulable weaklings, meets a mysterious, unsettlingly attractive male at a cocktail party, one who is not only distant and seemingly immune to her brandished charms, but who seems to hold her, to her disgruntlement and indignation, in a subtle contempt.