Robert, on a weekend break from college, returns home to his father, mother, and Uncle Snevely, his mother’s brother. After a family dinner, Robert, raking and burning leaves, is enamored by a skywriter overhead. Uncle Snevely, seeing the skywriter, relates to Robert and his mother a very poignant nostalgic memory about a daring and brilliantly talented skywriter who, in his rickety Curtiss JN-4 biplane, would write epitaphs and verse across a beautiful, blue summer sky. Snevely is a young executive in the ribbons division of a typewriter factory who is fascinated by the art and feats of a local skywriter, Nelson St. Yves. Similarly taken by St. Yves’ talents, he and Snevely’s lover Eunice devise a plan to meet St. Yves and have him write something from Edna St. Vincent Millay in the sky. Their plan, however, is co-opted by Snevely’s boss, Eunice’s father, Mr. Brown, as an oppurtunity to market the Triplex typewriter.  Eunice and Snevely go to meet St. Yves, who, as Snevely notes, is overly casual and “ill-bred,” much unlike his art. Eunice and St. Yves immediately take to each other, to Snevely’s dismay, exhaustedly spending the evening flirting and removed from Snevely. St. Yves takes Eunice and Snevely up in his biplane to witness skywriting firsthand, but Snevely— in the jarring, stomach churning aerial acrobatics— finds the experience to be unpleasant. Eunice and St. Yves run away together for some time. Later, Eunice, four months pregnant, returns to marry Snevely but dies from complications during childbirth. Robert and his mother both share their incredulity at Uncle Snevely’s story.