Summary
A puritanical lightning bolt cleaves through the celluloid when Stuart Emmett—ink-stained apostate of erotic philosophy—careens off a frostbitten road and into the lap of Conscience Williams, whose name already sounds like a sermon she never asked to preach. While her granite-jawed father rifles the wounded stranger’s manuscript like a Salem elder sniffing out witchcraft, the house quakes with the moral tectonics of 1920: printed sins versus inherited certainties. Love blooms illicitly in the margins, but Eben Tollman—moneyed, predatory, collector of ivory chess sets and other men’s mail—snips every artery of correspondence, hoarding the lovers’ words like scalps. A forged scandal—sleight-of-hand journalism worthy of yellow-press necromancy—paints Stuart as libertine par excellence, shackling Conscience to a marriage that reeks of cloves and coffin wood. On the nuptial eve, Marion Holby—luminous, repentant, a fallen star in mauve taffeta—steps from the blizzard of rumor to unsay every lie, yet dawn still finds the bridegroom slumped over damning envelopes, bourbon on his breath, the postage stamps like tiny black eyes. One shove, one splash, one mute pool later, the widow is emancipated from contractual virtue, free to chase the author whose theories of desire have now bled into lived catastrophe.
Synopsis
A young author of a book containing radical sexual theories Stuart Emmett, is injured when his automobile lunges out of control. He is found by Conscience Williams who takes him to her home, but when her father, a narrow-minded New Englander, reads selections from Stuart's book, he orders the young man out of his house. The couple, who have fallen in love, attempt to communicate through letters, but these are intercepted by Eben Tollman, a wealthy man with an interest in Conscience. When Conscience reads a newspaper story falsely accusing Stuart of scandal, she agrees to marry Tollman. On the eve of the marriage, Marion Holby, the woman linked to Stuart in the slander, comes to Conscience and clears him. The next morning, Conscience discovers her husband drunk and in his hands, the letters that he had intercepted. A scene ensues, and she telephones Stuart for help. During a fight between the two men, Tollman falls into a pool and drowns, freeing Conscience to pursue her true love.
