Summary
A glittering Broadway chorine, Patricia, is exiled by paternal decree to the hush of verdant nowhere, where Silas Wainwright—her father’s cigar-scented memory of a friend—presides over a crumbling estate like a faded satrap. She arrives with tap-shoes still humming city neon, only to find the household quietly at war: Emily, Silas’s porcelain daughter, is betrothed to the callow Horace, yet the local siren Maisie Morrison—half swamp-orchid, half-catamount—has her crimson nails hooked in his jugular. Patricia, equal parts flirt and firecracker, decides to launder Horace’s spine; in doing so she ignites John, Silas’s misanthropic heir, who wears his disdain for womankind like a mourning corsage. One moon-drunk evening Patricia yanks Horace out of Maisie’s mock-nuptial bacchanal; John, glimpsing silhouettes in flight, assumes elopement and slugs Horace into the lily pond. Silas, apoplectic, banishes Patricia back to the Great White Way, but John—suddenly thawed—overrules patriarchal thunder, reunites the rightful lovers, and claims Patricia for himself, while Silas finally uncorks a grin as brittle as old sherry.
Synopsis
On her father's advice, Patricia leaves her life as a chorus girl for the countryside surroundings of Silas Wainwright, an old friend of her father's. She immediately sides with Horace, a suitor to Wainwright's daughter Emily; and her efforts to disentangle Horace from his clinging vine, Maisie Morrison, the village vamp, result in the jealous concern of John Wainwright, a declared woman-hater. Seeing Patricia drag Horace from the vamp's bridal party, John mistakes the escape for an elopement and strikes Horace. In his fury Silas orders her back to Broadway, but John overrules his father; Horace and Emily are reunited; and Wainwright finally gives his blessing to both couples.
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