The story of Marian Forrester, a wife and then a widow in a small Nebraska town, and Niel Herbert, the narrator, who has been devoted to her since he was a child, is one of Cather`s lesser-known novels, but considered by many to be one of her best. Marian is a refined and civilizing presence in the rough town to which her marriage to a rich man takes her, but after a devastating love affair, followed by her husband`s death and the loss of her money, she makes changes in her life that, at first, Niel fails to understand. It`s only years later that he is able to see that her life was, in fact, a work of art with its own logic--that the woman he revered but considered lost was in fact the mistress of her fate, and a woman he can continue to admire.