The businessman and politician Amos Cabot has been murdered. While sitting at his funeral in the New York village of St. Botolphs, an unnamed journalist ruminates on his lifelong connections to Mr. Cabot and his family. Mrs. Cabot, his wife, is what the journalist affectionately calls an eccentric from Connecticut. A woman viciously prejudiced against alcohol, tobacco, Jewish people, and Black people, she wears seven diamond rings at all times except for Thursday afternoons, when she washes them and hangs them on a clothesline to dry outside.

The Cabots' problems and peculiarities alike, the narrator recalls, have bled into his life for years. Years before Mr. Cabot's funeral, the narrator becomes romantically involved with Molly, the younger of the Cabots' two daughters. Through her, he discovers that Mr. Cabot has hidden a son with dwarfism from a previous marriage in his house and away from the world. He is not, however, the first young Mr. Cabot whom the journalist has met. While still a child, his best friend, DeVarennes, tells him that Wallace, the boy with whom he has been swimming at summer camp, is Mr. Cabot's illegitimate son.

One Thursday afternoon not long after the journalist meets Wallace, Mrs. Cabot wakes up to find that Geneva, her eldest daughter, has stolen all seven of her diamonds from the clothesline outside and decamped to Egypt. The next day, the Cabots have a nasty fight, following which Mr. Cabot spends three days with Mrs. Wallace, his mistress, on the other side of the river. Within a week, he is dead: his wife has murdered him with arsenic from the corner drugstore. Back in the present day, the journalist finally flies to Luxor, Egypt, to meet Geneva after the funeral, whom he discovers has married and converted to Islam. He kisses her—and the Cabots—goodbye forever a week later and flies home.