A Butterfly on the Wheel

Summary

In the gilded twilight of Edwardian drawing rooms, vivacious Peggy Admaston pirouettes through champagne flutes and polite laughter while her financier husband, Admaston, barters affection for ledger ink; his absence becomes a vacuum soon filled by the velvet insinuations of Collingwood, a rake whose whispered compliments taste of absinthe and danger. A single spark at a Covent Garden melodrama—flames licking velvet curtains like scandalous tongues—sends husband racing back to a shadowed boudoir where a man’s abandoned gloves lie like accusatory commas across the marital counterpane. Misreading the punctuation, Admaston orchestrates a roadside trap: clandestine lanterns, a shuttered inn, hired witnesses, the machinery of divorce grinding with Puritan glee. Yet Lady Attwill—society’s circling hawk—later unpicks the seams of circumstantial cloth, revealing not adultery but only the ache of loneliness, allowing frostbitten vows to thaw into a tentative embrace as winter fog rolls across the Thames.

Synopsis

Peggy Admaston and her husband are socialites whose happy marriage quickly deteriorates as Admaston neglects his young wife for business matters, and is unaware of her loneliness and vulnerability. When Peggy is wooed by Admaston's friend Collingwood, who acts on his feelings without regard to consequences, she grows fond of him, but remains faithful to Admaston. After socialite Lady Attwill causes Admaston to doubt his wife's fidelity, his suspicions are furthered when a fire erupts one evening at the theater, and Admaston returns home unexpectedly to find that Peggy, who refused to accompany him because she said that she did not feel well, entertained a male visitor that evening. Admaston arranges to trap Peggy and Collingwood together at a country roadhouse, and begins divorce proceedings based on the resulting strong circumstantial evidence. Later, Lady Attwill convinces Admaston that Peggy's friendship with Collingwood was innocent and the couple is reunited.