A young writer, whose exquisitely aesthetic novels are becoming fashionable, forces those around her to play the roles she has invented. But an unexpected turn in her relationship with a real man, whom she chooses as the hero of her new novel, plunges her into depression. To forget herself, the heroine plunges headlong into the social life of London. But events again do not unfold the way she wants. She begins to realize the emptiness of her own life. The thirst for change and an unexpected feeling for a young ethnographer force the writer to go to Africa, where real, not fictitious, adventures await her.