Summary
A lepidopterist’s net becomes the noose in this 1915 phantasmagoria of marital attrition: Leander Lamb, whose fingers tremble more at the thought of a rare swallowtail than at his wife’s glare, spends sultry afternoons peeping through knotty plank fencing while the Widow Next Door performs her aquatic striptease in the swimming hole. Each splash is a cymbal-crash in his libido’s symphony. Mary Miranda Lamb—steel-eyed, corseted, scripture-quoting—tracks her husband’s scent the way a bloodhound pursues a wounded fox. The chase ricochets from bucolic meadows to the Gothic corridors of a sanatorium where orderlies in starched coats brandish cranial saws, promising a frontal-lobe eclipse to calm his “erotic delirium.” Escape catapults him into the widow’s silken machinations; she, a Circe in lace, needs Leander compromised so that her own paramour can wed Phyllis, Leander’s dewy niece. Clad only in a nightshirt and wielding a guttering candle like Diogenes hunting an honest grope, Leander somnambulates across moonlit floorboards, a living tableau of masculine absurdity. A forgotten billet-doux—perfumed, damning—slips from the dresser, lands like a guillotine blade, and severs the final thread of conjugal grace. Retribution arrives via a decades-old yarn of Mary’s premarital indiscretion, spun by Leander’s collegiate crony Blackwell; the public stocks—colonial relic turned suburban pillory—await. Mary’s wrists lock into splintered wood, her petticoat pooling like contrition. From her immobilized perch she surveys the carnival: husband chastened, widow thwarted, niece betrothed, butterfly unpinned yet still fluttering somewhere beyond the picket fence.
Synopsis
Leander Lamb, entomologist and matrimonial martyr, hunts the savage butterfly. He is flirtatiously inclined, but does not know "how." Leander's one solace is the "widow next door," her daily plunge in the old swimming hole interesting him unduly. This leads to a chase with Mary Miranda Lamb, his lawful wedded wife, in the role of chaser. In his effort to outdistance her, he lands in an institution for the mentally depressed, where the foes of depression wish to disfigure his none too beautiful skull. He escapes, and falls into the clutches of the beautiful "widow next door," who, to aid her friend, Allen Townsend in marrying Phyllis Atwood, Leander's niece, wishes to compromise him. The widow, posing as "Charity giving away her clothes," starts Leander on a "butterfly" chase which is interrupted by the arrival of Mary. Leander arrayed in a night-gown, candlestick in hand, proceeds to give the most realistic "sleepy walker's escapade" that Mary ever witnessed. A note from the widow, which Leander had forgotten on the dresser, proves the somnambulist's undoing. He evens up matters with Mary, when his old college chum, Blackwell, relates a most disgraceful story of Mary's maiden days. He sentences her to the "wrongdoers' rest," the stocks, the fate he had often met for too ardent "butterfly" chasing. Mary in the stocks is more manageable, and matters are straightened for the best interests of all.
