On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope ? interviewer and interviewee ? try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes ?