Summary
A porcelain-skinned scribe, John Constable, lives in a sun-dappled hush with his kittenish wife Kitty until the widow Margaret Alloway—black silk like spilled ink, smile like a paper-cut—slides into his study promising editorial salvation for his half-born manuscript Women’s Struggles. She murmurs footnotes into his ear, drapes her reputation over his shoulders, and schedules a candle-lit tête-à-tête that cruelly overlaps Kitty’s birthday. The neglected wife, stung by the clink of champagne flutes two rooms away, slips into midnight-blue velvet and accepts the opera box of notorious boulevardier Harry Travers; one carriage ride later she leaves a laconic note on the mantel and vanishes into the gas-lit labyrinth of bachelor chambers. John, suddenly allergic to his own indifference, tears through fog-slick streets only to find Harry’s rooms vacant, the windowpanes laughing back at him. What follows is a domino-row of compromising discoveries—bedroom doors ajar, corsets mislaid, reputations teetering—each tableau more incriminating yet innocuous than the last, until the widow’s machinations unravel like over-ribboned parcels and the Constables recognize that the only manuscript worth annotating is their marriage.
Synopsis
John Constable, a writer, falls prey to the designs of scheming widow Margaret Alloway to the dismay of his young wife Kitty. Feigning interest in John's work, the widow offers to collaborate on his new book, Women's Struggles, but when she convinces him to dine with her on Kitty's birthday, the neglected wife decides to retaliate. After attending the opera with handsome bachelor Harry Travers, Kitty accepts an invitation to share supper in his rooms, leaving a note for her husband. Aware of Harry's questionable reputation with women, John panics, but by the time he arrives at Harry's apartment, Kitty has disappeared. Following a series of incidents in which the widow, her suitor Teddy Sylvester, Travers, and the Constables are discovered in compromising situations that actually are innocent, John realizes that he far prefers Kitty to the widow and again becomes a loving husband.
