It is a warm June morning in the West End of St. Louis in the mid-thirties -- a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of the author's most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics -- the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony.