Michael Holme is a very talented violinist, whose teacher foresaw a promising career as a performer in his future, and yet who has ended up as the second violin in the Maggiore Quartet, a position as comfortable and without prospects as his life, which is grey and melancholic in a London that is equally sad. Incompetent in the real world, only two passions get him going: Schubert and his violin, a Tononi that his first friend and mentor, Mrs. Formby, gave him as a present, a woman who introduced him to the pleasures of music and poetry when he was a child. But the thick shell that maintains his cold and routine existence is soon broken by chance: one afternoon, in the middle of the bustle of the city, he thinks he sees Julia, a pianist whom he loved and lost ten years before due to his doubts and incapacity to confront reality.