Early twentieth-century American author Edith Wharton's 1928 novel about a group of seven step-siblings who strike up a relationship with a solitary bachelor on a yacht while hoping that their parents' reconciliation lasts. One of Mrs. Wharton's latest novels, this is a story of expatriate Americans in the 1920s. Its theme is the predicament of children whose rich, pleasure-mad parents progress through marriages and divorces as casually as they flit around the fashionable European resorts of the period.