A man begins telling his second-in-command at the bank he works at how he struggles to write about himself, and each time he does, he rips up the pages then throws them in the fire. He decides to tell the assistant what he recently wrote about— his first marriage— before the two start their business journey to Chicago. When the man was twenty years old and the woman he was dating was also twenty, he got married. He and his wife lived in an apartment on Sheridan Square in New York and fixed up the place to their liking, replacing the wood and hanging up a batik on the walls. The apartment building in which he lived was recently bought out by the bank he works at to build a new branch. Recently, the man went into the building to see how it had been renovated, to feel close to where he had once lived, bringing up memories about his first marriage.

The man and his wife had a nice marriage and acted more like young friends than like a couple. They read together, often laughing together or sitting in solemn silence together. They did not know many people, but the people they met they met at speakeasies. The man reflects on the fact that he is not really sure why he and his first wife got divorced, that it just seemed to be in fashion at the time. The two were only married for three years. Now, he feels that he is a different person than he was then; both he and his ex-wife are re-married with children. He thinks about a poem that his ex-wife used to read, remembers a line that asked where the snow of yesteryear has gone. He thinks about how the snows of yesteryear are not gone or melted but are merely somewhere else. He pictures his ex-wife's face in his head, her haircut and her smile, and tells his companion her name: Mildred Hastings, or Milly.