'The Counterfeits' reflects on life and Society in London after the First World War as it seemed to a young English girl who had been a V.A.D. nurse in the Odessa area of Bessarabia during the fighting of WWI and the Russian Revolution. While working during the war at a hospital for the wounded, Adela Clifford falls in love with a handsome Russian officer, Boris Galkin. After seducing her in a pavilion amongst the trees of his family's estate near Ismail, Boris immediately gets up, dresses himself, and walks out abandoning her naked, realising that he is still madly in love with his brother's wife! Three years later, back in London after the war, the emptiness of Adela's present life is contrasted with the excitement of the past, but eventually she realises that many of her judgments have been mistaken. She faces disillusion, but by reliving the past she finally readjusts herself to what she now sees as the truth.