Summary
Dawn tiptoes across a nameless metropolis, its sodium lamps still smoldering like spent matchsticks when George—marriage-band gleaming, collar askew—slips through the service door of an apartment house that might as well be a mausoleum of secrets. Beside him, an unnamed accomplice, equally ring-marked and rumpled, embodies every post-midnight panic of Edwardian masculinity. Their mission: scale the stairs without awakening the domestic deities waiting behind mahogany doors. George, buoyed by bourbon bravura, rehearses alibis while a silk stocking—pale as moonlit cream—lies coiled in his pocket like a serpent of satin. He intends it as a peace-offering, a shimmering apology for hours unaccounted. But the fabric carries a stowaway: a pin-fastened billet-doux, ink still fragrant with another woman’s perfume. Upstairs, his wife—part Penelope, part private-eye—paces the Persian rug, nostrils flared to the scent of duplicity. When the door creaks, she greets him with a smile sharp enough to slice meringue, accepting the hosiery with the grace of a matador. One glance at the note, and the boudoir becomes courtroom: silk cuffs tighten, sentences fly, and George’s swagger collapses into a puddle of patent-leather shame. Through a keyhole bursts a parade of pajama-clad chorines—neighbors, models, perhaps phantoms—whose satin stripes and lace edgings flicker across the foyer like newsreel confetti. Their presence reframes the marital farce into communal carnival: every shut door in the corridor now vibrates with whispered wagers on the verdict. By the time the sun hoists itself above the cornices, treaties are drafted in trembling whispers; a fresh pot of coffee steams where accusations simmered. The stocking, once evidence, becomes a flag of surrender, tied around the balcony railing, fluttering in pitiful truce.
Synopsis
George and another married man try to get into their apartments at an unconventional hour, without their wives being aware of it. George tries to bluff it when he is caught, but wifey detects a note pinned to the silk stocking he would offer her and he is betrayed. The resulting trouble is finally patched up, but not until after several girls in pajamas have appear.
