A married woman struggles to escape her deteriorating marriage. She meets a gentle, odd young man with whom she falls intensely in love and experiences with him the great illusion, the dream for which she was longing. She experiences both bewilderment and phenomenal joy. The young man, however, is "unsettled", mentally unbalanced and epileptic. When his doves, which he has raised with a singular and pathological love, all die from an unknown cause, he completely loses his senses and kills his beloved, believing he is offering her the ultimate freedom.