Red Pottage follows a period in the lives of two friends, Rachel West and Hester Gresley. Rachel is a wealthy heiress who falls in love with the weak-willed Hugh Scarlett after he has broken off an affair with Lady Newhaven (which he does not originally realize has been discovered by her husband). Hester, a novelist, lives with her judgmental brother, the pompous vicar of the fictional village of Warpington. Hester's brother disapproves of her writing and eventually burns the manuscript of a novel she has been writing. "I will break it off," says Hugh Scarlett to himself. "Thank Heaven, not a soul has ever guessed it." He thinks of the day he first met her, when he looked upon her as merely a pretty woman. He recalls their other days together, and the gradual building up between them of a fairy palace. He added a stone here, she a stone there -- until suddenly it became a prison. Had he been tempter, or tempted? He cannot say. He wants only to be out of it. His infatuation has run its course. His judgment has been whirled -- he tells himself it had been whirled, but had it really only been tweaked? -- from its center. It performed its giddy orbit, and now the check-string has brought it back to the point from whence it had set out -- namely, that she is merely a pretty woman. Yet nothing in life is simple. Lord Newhaven suspects -- or more than suspects: for he introduces the modern equivalent of the duel! And Hugh has had a vision of hope for the future, in a sympathetic soul -- in the eyes of Rachel West.