The Constant Nymph

Teresa is the daughter of a brilliant avant-garde composer, Albert Sanger, who with his 'circus' of precocious children, slatternly mistress and assorted hangers-on, lives in a ramshackle chalet in the Swiss Alps. The family and their home life may be chaotic, but visitors fall into an enchantment and the claims of respectable life or upbringing fall away.

'Unbalanced, untaught and fatally warm-hearted', at fourteen Teresa has already fallen deeply in love with Lewis Dodd, a gifted composer like her father. Confidently she awaits maturity - and Lewis - but this longed-for destiny is shattered when her father dies suddenly and Lewis is drawn away by Teresa's beautiful cousin Florence. However, neither his marriage nor Teresa's exile to an English boarding school can break the spell the gods have placed on Lewis and his constant nymph. But, for her, the outside world holds nothing but tragedy.