Michael dreams of waking up during the night and seeing nuns gathered around the lake, pulling a drowned corpse from it. He wakes in fear, wondering what the dream might signify.

The Imber estate has been in his family for generations, and Michael always refused to visit it. He planned to become a priest but ultimately felt unable, yet when he met the Abbess of Imber Abbey, his life changed. She introduced the idea of a lay community adjacent to the convent, and Michael found a new purpose, feeling he belonged to a group of people “who can live neither in the world nor out of it” (81). As he began to develop the community, people joined him, and he especially welcomed James Tayper Pace, who comes from an old military family and has many characteristics of a born leader. Yet while Michael would gladly relinquish his role, James refuses it, thus creating “a faint appearance of two parties” (86).

Today, Michael holds the dreaded weekly “Meeting,” in which people often express disagreements about the daily running of the community: over the acquisition of a mechanical cultivator (James and Mark are against it on principle of communal simplicity) and the shooting of squirrels and pigeons (which James, Patchway, and Nick indulge in).