Summary
On a frost-silk evening of confetti and cracked champagne, Stephen De Koven—pedigreed, porcelain-mannered, and catastrophically cash-strapped—slides a gold band onto the gloved finger of Muriel Chester, heiress to a coal-and-cattle empire. Yet the marriage bed, anticipated as a boudoir of rose-petals, turns into a tribunal: Muriel, reading the ledger of her bridegroom’s pupils rather than his vows, perceives that every whispered endearment carries a price tag. Pride armors her; she retreats into a self-wrought convent of lace handkerchiefs and slammed mahogany doors, granting Stephen conjugal visitation only when the social calendar insists. Months calcify into years. One bleary dawn, while motoring through fog-throttled alleys, Stephen glimpses Tina Pierce—a soot-smudged slum sapling whose face is Muriel’s reflection in a tarnished spoon. Reasoning that desire is only skin-deep, he lifts Tina from gutter to garret, swaddles her in chinchilla and champagne promises, and scripts a Pygmalion fever dream: replicate the visage, reboot the heart. But facsimile lacks soul; opulence curdles into penance. When Muriel learns that her estranged husband has never spent a sou of her fortune—instead quietly tripling her father’s holdings through sleepless brilliance—her icy indignation melts into something perilously like hope. Tina, now wise to the arithmetic of actual devotion, engineers a last-ditch rapprochement; steamer-trunk labels for Europe flutter uselessly as the couple’s glances finally lock without collateral.
Synopsis
Socially prominent but penniless Stephen De Koven marries Muriel Chester, a woman whose loveliness he admires but whose money he really desires. Discovering this on her wedding night, Mrs. De Koven, because of her love for her husband and her wounded pride, elects to live her life alone, seeing her husband only when formalities demand. One day while driving home, De Koven sees Tina Pierce, a child of the slums who bears a striking resemblance to his wife. Believing that it is merely his wife's beauty that attracts him, he installs Tina in an apartment and surrounds her with luxury, attempting to replicate his wife, only to discover that he loves Muriel more than her beauty or money. Spurned by Muriel once again, De Koven decides to leave for Europe. Tina, aware of De Koven's love for his wife, attempts to reconcile the pair. When Muriel learns that her husband has not touched a cent of her money but has made himself invaluable to her father's business, all obstacles between them are swept away.
Review Excerpt
"
Stephen De Koven’s dilemma arrives dressed in white tie and tails yet reeks of the pawnshop: how to remain splendid while the coffers echo. Bessie Barriscale, all clavicle and candlelit resolve, plays Muriel as a daguerreotype come scaldingly alive—her hurt is never the vapors-and-hand-to-forehead variety but a quiet, almost surgical extraction of self. Barriscale lets the camera gorge on micro-tremors: a blink held half a second too long, the way her throat slides when she swallows a sob. The..."
