David Enders, pilot for the French Army during the Great War, returns to Connecticut after wandering post-war France with a condition similar to shell-shocked men from the trenches. At home he must contend with a difficult father, a sister locked in a mysterious post-influenza coma, and a volatile country still in the grips of wartime paranoia and civil liberty restrictions. He finds work building houses in Old Lyme, a summertime town of bootleggers, rum runners, flappers, clammers, crooked deputies, and the famous Old Lyme Art Colony whose impressionist painters don't want their bucolic landscapes marred by cookie-cutter cottages. Enders falls in love with one of those artists, but encircled by suffocating customs, illiberal laws, and petty criminals, they're looking for an escape.