 The film, in which W. Somerset Maugham is himself a minor character, drifting in and out of the lives of the major players, opens at a party held in the summer of 1919 at a Chicago country club.Elliott Templeton, an expatriate who has been living in France for years, has returned to the United States for the first time since before the war to visit his sister, Louisa Bradley, and his niece, Isabel.Isabel is engaged to be married to Larry Darrell, recently returned from service as a pilot during the Great War.