After her sophomore year of college Brigid McBride spends the summer with her best friend Laura Hughes, living in New York City and demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. It's the summer of 1968, a summer of love and a summer of violence when the nation is divided on the issue of the war and a new generation is rebelling against the order imposed by the previous generation, engaging in actions against the war and for civil rights, women's rights, and protecting the environment. Brigid and Laura, who are students in the nursing program at St. Catherine College in Yonkers, are sharing an apartment in the East Village with Kieran O'Donnell, a Jesuit seminarian who is planning an action against the draft board to stop it from sending mostly poor young men to fight in a war that he believes is a crime against humanity. Brigid is in love with him, and Laura is in love with a conscientious objector who fled to Canada to escape the draft. The girls develop a close relationship, and they feel they are accomplishing something by giving their message of love and peace to the thousands of people they encounter at tourist attractions in the city. But when they learn about Kieran's plan, which would involve the use of violence and would therefore violate the principles that support their position against the war, they oppose him, and unable to resolve her differences with him, Laura departs to join her boyfriend in Canada while Brigid remains at the apartment in the hope of getting Kieran to abandon his plan and to love her as she loves him.