It opens with the "twenty lovesick maidens" yearning over their dear Reginald Bunthorne.  Lady Jane, another of Gilbert's female battleaxes in the line of Katisha, Ruth and the rest, is the most lovesick and determined of them all.  Reginald, the aesthetic, wants only Patience, the village milkmaid.  he knows noting of love, and cares little for poetry; for that matter, she doesn't care very much for Reginald either.

Into this enclave of aestheticism march the Dragoon Guards, back, we may suppose, from some colonial field, to greet the maidens to whom a year ago they were all engaged.  Things have happened since then; Reginald Bunthorne, in fact has happened, and the military men are persona not very grata.  Bunthorne is in the ascendant.

Left alone, however, he lets us in on a secret.  He's an aesthetic sham; he is not "fond of uttering platitudes in stained-glass attitudes".  Enter now one Archibald Grosvenor who is in the same line of poetic business.

It is at this point that Bunthorne, spurned by Patience, decides to put himself up to be raffled for.  The draw is just about to be made when Patience has a thought - if, as they tell her, love is wholly unselfish emotion, and if she would get no pleasure in loving Bunthorne, then it is her duty to love him.  This settles Bunthorne for the moment and sends the maidens back into the arms of the Dragoons.  All would have been well if Grosvenor had not shown up at this point.  The maidens are entranced by him and the mad pursuit starts all over again.  Jane alone remains faithful to Reginald.

Grosvenor is now pursued by the maidens on a double-shift, no half-holiday basis.  The Colonel, the Duke and the Major decide to fight on the same aesthetic battleground and get pretty near to perfection - "quite too all-but", anyhow.  Bunthorne wants a showdown, and Grosvenor, glad of an excuse to become once more "a commonplace type with stick and a pipe", gives way.  Poor Bunthorne ... everything goes against him, as you will see in the closing moments of our play.