Caught in the Act

Priscilla Kane, silk-heiress and firebrand, vaults over the wrought-iron palisade of her finishing school like a comet breaching dusk, trailing privilege and petulance in equal scorn. She spurns the dynastic match her father, the grain-speculating titan, has soldered for her, and slips incognito into the city’s underbelly—a realm of thrum and thistle where shirt-fronts fray and reputations unravel. In the sepia haze of a mending shop she is mistaken by Langdon Trevor, muckraker extraordinaire, for one of the drudges whose fingers he pays to re-stitch his ethics along with his cuffs. Smelling adventure, she lets the error stand, becomes his midnight seamstress, and threads every buttonhole with flirtation. A shutterbug in Kane’s pocket snaps the scandalous tableau—Trevor reclined, Priscilla bending like a Pre-Raphaelite nurse—turning private dalliance into public fuse. Through the casement they bolt, exchange vows in the freight-yard dawn, and leave the paternal empire smoldering behind them like last night’s newsprint.