A flashback recounts the courtship of Mark and Mary Rampion. Years earlier, Mary Felpham, daughter of a wealthy family, encounters Mark trespassing on her family’s estate. She is intrigued by his intensity and dismisses her companions’ class-based scorn. They meet again when a play Mark wrote is performed at a church bazaar; he is a local scholarship boy whose mother is a seamstress. A relationship begins, marked by Mark’s passionate discussions of art, philosophy, and class divides. Mary falls for him, rejecting her military suitor. After he proposes, they marry against her father’s wishes, and Mark reluctantly agrees to live on Mary’s small inheritance to pursue his writing career rather than take a safe teaching job. Their early married life highlights their contrasting backgrounds: Mary’s natural, aristocratic ease clashes with Mark’s ingrained, working-class puritanism. She embraces a life of poverty and housework, while he admires her vitality but is inwardly shocked by her nonchalance, forcing him to confront the repressions of his upbringing.

The narrative returns to the restaurant, where Spandrell continues to boast about his technique for seducing young women, generalizing from the case of a girl named Harriet Watkins. Mark Rampion interrupts, diagnosing Spandrell’s behavior as a form of vengeance stemming from self-hatred, particularly a hatred of the body and sex. Rampion expands this into a critique of modern society, claiming that Christianity and science have created a “disease” that vivisects humanity by separating spirit from flesh. Spandrell defends asceticism as a path to mystical experience, but Rampion passionately argues for a “sane, harmonious” balance that embraces the whole self. He contrasts the healthy “phallism” of the ancients with modern promiscuity, which he sees as just another form of contempt for life. When Spandrell suggests the poet Shelley as an example of someone truly alive, Rampion launches into a furious critique, calling Shelley an inhuman “fairy slug” who lied about reality.

Lucy Tantamount arrives at the restaurant with a loud, drunken group—Cuthbert Arkwright, a publisher; Willie Weaver, a verbose man; and Peter Slipe, an Assyriologist—disrupting the conversation and making Walter Bidlake miserable. Peter complains to Walter about Beatrice Gilray, a writer, having evicted him. The scene cuts to Beatrice’s home, where she comforts the editor Denis Burlap as he grieves for his late wife, Susan. Back at the restaurant, Rampion warns of a coming social revolution by a dehumanized working class. In a separate scene, the scientist Lord Edward Tantamount and his assistant, Illidge, discuss humanity’s disproportionate consumption of resources. The Rampions and Arkwright’s party eventually leave. Walking home, Rampion tells Mary that Spandrell is a “permanent adolescent” (132). Walter stays behind with Lucy and Spandrell, and Lucy tells a long, mocking story about her father, Lord Edward, warning her about being kissed in conservatories. The chapter also cuts to the aging painter John Bidlake, Walter’s father, whose memories are triggered by a letter from his daughter Elinor, and to Polly Logan, who wakes her mother, Mrs. Logan, in a panic over a social gaffe.

Late at night, Walter Bidlake reluctantly accompanies Lucy Tantamount and Spandrell to a revolutionary club, where they encounter Illidge. Meanwhile, Walter’s pregnant and ill partner, Marjorie, waits anxiously at home, convincing herself that his cruelty is deliberate and that he wants her to die. Walter finally leaves after 3:00 am and goes home. Marjorie confronts him, but he breaks down in a fit of sobbing and self-hatred, and she comforts him. In a taxi to Lucy’s house, Spandrell theorizes that Walter is a born “murderee”—a natural victim who invites maltreatment. At Lucy’s, Spandrell describes Illidge’s hypocrisy as a militant communist who secretly supports his own family in spite of his calls for emotional detachment. Lucy expresses boredom with conventional pleasures and voices a desire for more violent and forbidden experiences.

Walter Bidlake begins the day resolved to be faithful to Marjorie and end things with Lucy Tantamount. At the newspaper office, his editor, Denis Burlap, offers him a humiliatingly small raise. A flashback reveals Burlap’s tense relationship with his secretary, Miss Cobbett, whom he hired after his wife’s death but whom he now resents. Despite his resolutions, Walter takes a call from Lucy and goes to her house, intending to explain his decision. His passionate advances are thwarted first by her parrot and then by the arrival of Illidge. Furious, Walter goes home, but Marjorie smells Lucy’s perfume on him. In the ensuing argument, she tells him to leave. Walter returns to Lucy’s house with newfound confidence, and she cancels her dinner plans, becoming his mistress that night. In a separate scene, Spandrell’s mother, Mrs. Knoyle, visits his filthy apartment to give him money, leading to a painful confrontation in which he blames her remarriage for his unhappiness.