Summary
A sinuous morality tale unfurls along Coney Island’s salt-stung boardwalk, where neon haze kisses the Atlantic and the mechanical scream of roller-coasters becomes a pagan chant. Eve Leslie—once a fugitive from Pride—now stalks the mirage of Passion itself, her chiffon dress snapping like a surrender flag in the night wind. She locks eyes with Leonidas, a Herculean mountebank whose bronzed torso gleams under arc lights, each sinew a billboard for self-worship. His act is a pageant of hubris: high-dive maidens cascade around him like offerings, water droplets turning momentary diamonds before shattering into brine. Eve, thirsty for transcendence, signs her name to his troupe, unaware that the ink is blood from another woman’s marriage vow. Behind the greasepaint lurks a wife discarded like a broken barbell, while backstage corridors reek of turpentine, cheap cigars, and the copper tang of ambition. The narrative corkscrews from seaside vulgarity to Madison Square’s cathedral of sweat, where Leonidas grapples a granite-jawed world champion under klieg suns, veins bulging like cathedral gargoyles. Eve, draped in tulle and delusion, stands at the altar’s lip until Adam Moore—part guardian, part ghost of her better self—yanks her back from the abyss, the wedding bells transmuting into the Garden’s final bell-clap of victory. Salvation arrives not on a white horse but in the nick of time, a whispered caution that Passion without conscience is merely another glittering cage.
Synopsis
Escaping from "Pride," Eve Leslie next is tempted by the sin of "Passion." Eve goes to Coney Island and there sees Leonidas, a handsome strong man who is appearing in an athletic exhibition which includes a number or diving girls. In spite of Adam Moore's protests, Eve contrives to meet Leonidas, who employs her as a member of his troupe. Leonidas is a despicable person always posing, but Eve does not realize that. She does not know, either, that Leonidas is married and that he has practically deserted his wife. Eve finds herself in rough company. She thinks she loves Leonidas and she is blind to real conditions. She surmounts one difficulty after another, she passes through a series of thrilling scenes culminating with the evening at Madison Square Garden when Leonidas defeats the world's champion wrestler in a grueling battle. Through Adam's aid, Eve, who has unconsciously got herself into a terrible predicament, is saved from herself just as she was about to marry Leonidas, who had cast off his wife.
