The plot involves a threesome of teenagers. Phillipson Durham, a bookstarved only child of ailing parents who grows up to become a college professor, finds some relief in friendship with Billy Breedlove, the popular athletic pride of Belvedere who is a young man of simple, uncomplicated truths, and with Billy's girl, Marilee, called by Melvin Maddocks, "every middle-aged man's vision of his first girl." When Phil unintentionally causes Billy to plunge to his death from a water tower while consummating a prank, Marilee, pregnant by Billy, commits suicide.

Victoria Cochran, a judge's widow and the town's freethinker who lives on an estate called Crystal Wells down a lovely cottonwood-lined lane, becomes, by virtue of her membership on the school board, Phil's friend and mentor. It is she who tells Phil to seek the beauty behind the banality and she who secretly provides the money for him to go...