The Relentless City is a manners novel built around Lord Bertie Keynes, intending to inherit the title and pledged property of a young English widow. These two people decide they want to marry wealth, and that means marrying Americans. Bertie must marry money, and Sybil admires the American spirit. A novel about the American way of life, embodied by the millionaire and workaholic himself, a former railway porter, Lewis Palmer – a man whose whole life is directed, with great concern, to making money.