When the enchanting Zuleika arrives in Oxford she immediately captivates every undergraduate creating a strange atmosphere of universal infatuation, and her beauty transforms admiration into collective obsession as even the proud and detached Duke of Dorset confesses his love only to be rejected because she cannot love a man who succumbs to her charm, and within this paradox the emotions of the students grow increasingly exaggerated and detached from reality, turning love into a shared fixation rather than a personal feeling, and gradually the entire university begins to fall under the spell of a single overwhelming illusion.