Nineteen-year-old Beryl Beaton takes up a place at Trismegist Towers Finishing School. She is soon mixed up haplessly in a bizarre, longstanding boundary dispute with neighbouring Parvex Hall. The discipline at Trismegist runs a gamut from traditional corporal punishment to inhumation in mud, and worse. But Beryl soon finds it as nothing compared to the flagellant excesses of sybarites of Parvex.