While working diligently as a typist for a law office, Jo covertly memorizes the details of the new assistant Lucia Mazzano's striking appearance. She takes in Lucia's delicate yellow dress, olive skin, long lashes. The appeal of Lucia's beauty colors Jo's rigid daily rituals, back and forth from the typewriter to the housekeeping demands of her father's house. Her father is cold and persnickety, her brother Irving is no help, her sister Celia is unmoored, erratic and often in need of supervision. Jo wakes up before dawn to savor the silence and emptiness.

Jo is called out of work to find Celia has had an incident she won't explain in a diner, with pie strewn all over the counter and angry customers and waiters confronting her. When she tells Lucia her sister is unwell, Lucia offers to pray for her. Lucia is obsessed with saints - she knows their life stories and prays to them fervently. On Sunday Jo presses her ear to the church door, picturing Lucia in prayer. Her imaginings grow more intimate, imagining Lucia in gauzy dresses with long necklines and feeling herself grow damp. She becomes addicted to this new pleasure, praying for Lucia to notice her, buying a new set of clothes to attract her. But when Lucia brings news of a new beau, Jo barely contains her breakdown. She begins switching papers in Lucia's files out of order.

When Celia isn't spending time in the garden she becomes hard to manage, so Jo takes off work to take care of her. On Sunday she spies Lucia and the beau heading into church, and she fakes illness to stay away longer. When she does come back she is emotionless, completing her work and then muddling Lucia's files once the office is empty. The lawyers grow impatient with Lucia's errors and she becomes flustered and miserable, at a loss to explain her poor performance. Jo is sweet to her all the while, up to the moment she is let go. But Jo's numbness persists - the only place she finds tranquility is sitting on the back porch, smoking her father's tobacco and wearing his fedora, watching her sister in the garden.