People change. They die. They outgrow. A year passes, you cross the road to avoid an old best friend.

A writer, mellowed into middle-age, urbane, but weary of loving women who think themselves sophisticated, secludes himself in a country house outside of Dublin with an old woman who cooks him cabbage and bacon. He meets a gawky shopgirl, hungry for romance and poetry.

"I want nothing," she promises. And this the writer, sick now of passions, feels he can give her. They become lovers, and he learns that she wants a great deal more. She learns he has a wife, a daughter.

Always the camera trains upon her transcendental face, eyes widened by arrested tears, tentative, reaching, wistful in her offerings of tender inadequacy. Here in her eyes, green eyes, the film unfolds. As she steals into his bedroom, only to resist him. As a pinch-lipped minister exhorts her for her mortal sin. As her father's drunken friends break into the adulterer's home. As he ignores her, making witty cocktail talk with superficial antagonists.

Old men, young girls they are blissful only in stories. She runs away on a bluff. He does not follow. He returns to his wife and she, with the resilience of youth, to her silly Dublin friendships.

But the moment, the lovely, sad, delicate moment of her love--that is eternal in her eyes. And I can scarcely forsee the time when I shall no longer be haunted by Rita Tushingham's eyes' when I no longer see even a little of their sageness in the aspect of anyone I hurt.