Fearing her arrest for her outspokenness, Marji's parents send her to a French lycée in Vienna, Austria. She lives with Catholic nuns and is upset by their discriminatory and judgmental behavior. Marji makes few friends and ultimately feels intolerably isolated in a foreign land surrounded by annoyingly superficial people who take their freedom for granted and view her with open disdain. As the years go by, she is thrown out of her shelter for insulting a nun, and moves between houses until she rents a room from Dr. Frau Schloss, an unstable former philosophy teacher.