Mrs. Plum's Pudding

An unassumingly bucolic ranch, suddenly gushing black gold, catapults the widowed Mrs. Plum and her guileless son Eddie from dust-choked paddocks into the chandeliered salons of a city that chews up new money and spits out gossip. Enter Lord Burlington, a velvet-gloved predator whose vowels drip like treacle yet whose solvency evaporates faster than morning dew; he orchestrates a quadrille of affections, steering the Plums toward the bejewelled Van Zants—mother a matriarchal barracuda, daughter Betty a sloe-eyed siren whose laughter ricochets between sincerity and strategy. Under gilded ceilings the courtships bloom: Burlington murmurs land-poor poetry to Mrs. Plum while Eddie, all elbows and ardor, stumbles into Betty’s radiance like a moth enticed by a kerosene lamp. Banns are read, florists summoned, organists rehearsed—until a parchment vanishes, supposedly the very deed to the ranch, and the baroque edifice of matrimonial mercantilism collapses. Burlington flees, coattails fluttering like white flags; Eddie and Betty, unchastened, dash to a justice of the peace; Mrs. Plum, pride scorched, prepares to slink back to sagebrush and solitude. Yet the dowager’s coup de théâtre arrives with a wink: the purloined papers were decoys, her oil fortune still bubbles beneath the prairie, and the penniless aristocrat, now contrite on bended knee in a dusty depot, discovers that love, like crude, can be prospected in the most barren hearts.