May Sarton's celebrations in this book center around the friendships that flowered in her life from age twenty-six to age forty-five—between the end of and the beginning of . Her subjects include her father, the noted science historian George Sarton; people in the arts—Elizabeth Bowen, Louise Brogan, Jean Dominique; and people who lived lives remote from the center—Marc, the vigneron of Satigny, in the foothills of the Jura mountains, and Quig, the painter of Nelson, New Hampshire.