In which on a bleak February afternoon in a London club, Mrs. Wilkins, a quiet and overlooked woman, discovers an advertisement for a furnished medieval Italian castle to let in April, igniting a wistful longing for escape from her dreary domestic life. In a chance encounter, she shares this dream with Mrs. Arbuthnot, a woman devoted to her duties and the poor, and together they tentatively imagine the possibility of taking this hopeful holiday.