The novella "The Captain's Doll" is a romance story set in both Germany and England. It revolves around the illicit romance of a fallen German aristocrat Countess Johanna 'Hannele' zu Rassentlow as she dates an English naval officer with an unusual philosophy, Captain Alexander Hepburn. The intimate relationship between the two is however intruded upon when the captain's wife Evangeline travels to Germany suspicious of foul play. Heavily metaphorical, the book vividly depicts the dehumanizing effects of war on Hepburn – an English gentleman who had been part of the war machine and in the aftermath has come to believe that "we are worth so very little".