The husband of a young girl who has just killed herself relates in a formal, almost detached manner, the strange story of their meeting, marriage and life together. It reveals the situation of a relationship between a gentle, but demanding teenager and an older man too set in his ways to cope with her.

He, an aloof, conventional, middle-aged pawnbroker, is unable to allow himself truly to feel. His young wife is a free, gentle girl, who gives physical love and offers a greater one which he can neither accept nor understand. From her death, he gains the humanity she was unable to arouse in him while she lived.