Summary
A velvet-gloved predator of leisure, Montgomery Seaton glides through drawing-rooms scattering favors like confetti, blind to the frost forming on his wife’s neglected cheekbones. Into this chandeliered chill drifts Mrs. Hammond, her past a smuggled bruise: a youthful elopement, a cohabitation with a married man, a child conceived in the aftermath of betrayal, now orphaned again by the death of the clandestine nurse who shielded it. Seaton, ever the meddling archangel, recasts himself as the infant’s progenitor and persuades the cuckolded Hammond to adopt the foundling—thereby installing the living cipher of his wife’s sin beneath the marital roof. A misdelivered letter detonates the charade; Hammond’s humiliation ricochets through a ballroom where champagne flutes tremble like tuning forks. One gunshot later, Mrs. Hammond’s body becomes both shield and confessional, intercepting the bullet meant for Seaton. Meanwhile, Ernest Courtney’s tongue-tied ardor for the widowed Vera Lane is jolted into articulation by the same centrifugal force that whips the Seatons’ marriage toward the abyss. In the end, every liaison—licit or lacerated—knots and unknots under Vera’s cool orchestration, leaving two couples re-wed not in innocence but in the scar-tissue of knowledge.
Synopsis
Montgomery Seaton, one of the idle rich, makes a hobby of befriending everybody upon whom he can intrude his good offices. Thus occupied, he neglects his wife considerably, and she in turn gives her entire attention to household duties. Vera Lane is a rich widow with whom Ernest Courtney is in love but too bashful to pursue. Mrs. Hammond comes to Seaton in distress with the story that some years earlier, she left home with a married man and lived with him for several months. Upon discovering that she had been deceived, she returned home and later wed John Hammond. Some weeks after her marriage, her husband was called away on a business trip; while he was gone Mrs. Hammond became the mother of a child, the result of her conduct previous to her becoming Mrs. Hammond. She concludes with the statement that the nurse who has always secretly cared for her child has just died and that the child must be provided with a home. Seaton goes to Hammond and relates a story which in substance makes Seaton the child's parents, and induces Hammond to adopt the child; thus Mrs. Hammond receives into her own home the child of her illicit adventure. Later Mrs. Hammond writes to Seaton, telling that the child safely arrived in her home, and further makes clear the unfortunate condition under which the baby was born. By mistake Seaton gives the note to Hammond; upon reading it, Hammond concludes that Seaton played a trick on him and induced him to adopt the issue of an affair between Mrs. Hammond and Seaton. That very night, while attending a reception, Hammond discovers Seaton and Mrs. Hammond in confidential conversation. Hammond shoots, but the bullet strikes Mrs. Hammond, who has thrown herself in front of Seaton to protect him. Coincident with these details, Seaton undertakes to present Ernest Courtney's love affair to Vera Lane, the widow, in convincing fashion. While progressing with this purpose. Mrs. Seaton becomes suspicious of her husband and is doubly mystified when she sees him carrying the child to Mrs. Hammond's home. Since she witnessed Mrs. Hammond's shooting and is a friend of all the concerned parties, the widow attempts to straighten the various entanglements, and succeeds so well that the Seatons reconcile, as do the Hammonds, after Mrs. Hammond has told her husband of her past.
