The book is an eloquent plea for the freedom of woman from sex slavery as established by English law. “The Aliettes of England! The women whose sole excuse for illegal matehood is love! There are half a million such in Great Britain to-day: women whose only crime is that, craving happiness, they have taken their happiness in defiance of some male.” The Aliette in question falls in love with Ronald Cavendish, after years of a joyless existence by the side of an unloved husband who has completed her alienation from him by his repeated infidelities. When she explains the situation to her husband, she not only fails to get her release but arouses his sensual passion and proprietary instincts whereupon Aliette and Ronald run away. It is a story of high courage on the one hand and of revengeful cruelty on the other; of the bitterness of social ost racism and of the injustice of English law towards women; of the wonderful awakening of an old woman, Ronald's mother, thru love of her son, to an entirely new conception of social right and wrong.