An Amateur Devil

Carver Endicott, silk-scarved and ivory-cuffed, glides through drawing-rooms like a porcelain swan on a mirror lake—until his fiancée, eyes glittering with boredom, pronounces him too exquisite to wed. Determined to soil the family escutcheon, he descends the social ladder rung by greasy rung: first swapping champagne for barn-musk among sun-cracked hands, later balancing silver trays in a hotel where gossip is the daily special. The press, ever hungry for paragons, recasts each humiliation as saintly humility; headlines crown him the ‘Ascetic Adonis.’ Frustrated, he clutches at scandal’s hem by courting a velvety actress whose reputation is already frayed like a theater curtain. Even the camera-flash cabals refuse to hiss; instead they toast his democratic ardor. Defeated by his own incorruptible aura, he drifts back to the woman who spurned him—only to find that the taint of ordinariness she once loathed has mysteriously evaporated, leaving him acceptable husband material in a finale as dryly comic as a champagne cork that refuses to pop.