The story begins by setting the garden scene: a mild, breezy, summer day in July with "perhaps a hundred stalks" of colorful flowers, petals unfurled to meet the sunlight. The light hits not only the flowers in an "oval-shaped flower-bed" but the brown earth from which they spring and across which a small snail is slowly making its way. As human characters saunter thoughtfully or chattily through the garden and through the story, the narrator returns again and again to descriptions of the garden and the snail's slow progression.

Men and women meander down the garden paths, zigzagging like butterflies, as the narrator hones in on particular conversations. The first group the reader meets is a husband and wife walking just ahead of their children. The husband, Simon, privately reminisces about asking a former girlfriend to marry him. As he waited for her answer, he hoped...