Summary
A sybaritic heir, Spencer Wellington, dances on the lip of neurological ruin—his brain already honey-combed by syphilitic cankers—yet spurns the surgeon’s prophecy of creeping paralysis. He weds Grace Valient, a porcelain beauty whose gaze could melt marble, while Dr. Rand, the taciturn physician who covets her, seals the groom’s doom behind Hippocratic silence. From their poisoned union issues a convulsed infant whose brief squall expires in a night; grief flays Grace’s mind to ribbons, so a changeling is smuggled into the cradle like contraband hope. As Spencer’s intellect liquefies into nocturnal delirium, he barricades himself in a candle-lit seraglio within the family mausoleum-estate, swirling champagne fountains over the thighs of hired danseuses until his heart erupts mid-revel. The widowed Grace, sanity stitched together by Rand’s devotion, stands amid the cinders of two marriages—one to a man, one to a mirage—while the camera lingers on a bassinet that rocks only wind.
Synopsis
Spencer Wellington, a wealthy young man, who is threatened with paresis, will not take his physician's warning, and marries Grace Valient. Dr. Rand loves the same woman, but his professional honor will not permit him to tell her the secret about her husband. A child is born, a hopeless defective that dies almost immediately. The mother loses her mind for a time, and another child is substituted for the dead baby. In the meantime the husband keeps getting worse. Realizing that he cannot hold off the moment of his mental breakdown much longer, Wellington starts in on a fast round of debauchery. He keeps a number of dancing girls in a secret retreat on his estate, and one night falls dead in tin- middle of a wild carouse. Indications point to the union of Doctor Rand and the widow.
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