Three anonymous, phantom-like people—two men and a woman—drift and muse in the game rooms, corridors and piano alcove of a seaside hotel or sanitorium. The narrator, a newcomer, loves the young woman. Much of the time these two converse, exploring their existence (or non-existence) and their relationship to a professorial man who is "not very old yet strangely ruined." The ambiguous condition of the three suggests the living death of a shared dream, hallucination or endless wait in limbo, where emotions still have sharp validity. At times the novel has the quality of a musical poem, with themes and variations played on certain words: calm, space, light, suffering.