This book is a collection of short stories that starts its first chapter with the book's title - The Private Life. Set in London, the narrator begins by contrasting the city with Switzerland to his friend, and the differences in travel experience. For London, to the narrator and his friend, is synonymous with the modern indignity of travel—the promiscuities and vulgarities, the station and the hotel, the gregarious patience, the struggle for scrappy attention, the reduction to a numbered state. Other stories in this book are The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, and Owen Wingrave.