Summary
A man of patrician expectation, Henry Warburton, shackles himself to a nine-year limbo before a family fortune will unlock; fleeing the ticking clock, he burrows into sylvan obscurity and weds Nola, a feral sylph whose speech is bark and whose manners are loam. Their cabin idyll fractures when Grant Hamilton—urbane mirror to Henry’s rustic blindness—descends, perceives in Nola a dormant duchess, spirits her away to a candle-lit hermitage, and for twelve lunar cycles sculpts her through books, lilac silk, and Chopin preludes while anonymous epistles taunt the cuckolded husband with bulletins of metamorphosis. A daughter is born in clandestine candlelight; a year later, Manhattan’s gaslit streets frame the revelation: Nola, now ivory-gloved and velvet-voiced, glides back into Henry’s astounded arms, the inheritance now incidental beside the bequest of her transfigured self.
Synopsis
Henry Warburton, who is compelled to wait 9 years before coming into a willed inheritance, retires to the backwoods and marries Nola, a girl with no refinement or social graces. At length, his friend Grant Hamilton visits him, sees in Nola possibilities to which Warburton is blind, and "kidnaps" her. Hiding in a cottage, Nola is educated by Hamilton and a governess while Warburton searches in vain for her, mystified by frequent notes advising him of her progress, the last of which tells him of a daughter's birth. A year later, Warburton returns to New York where he meets Hamilton and Nola; amazed at the transformation, he is happily reunited with his wife.
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