Summary
Snow powders the gables of a Park-Versailles manor where Marjorie Caner—heir to a gilded sarcophagus of echoing ballrooms—returns from Europe carrying nothing but architectural loneliness. Across a parapet she spies Anthony Quintard, a gaunt poet whose breath freezes into iambs above a tenement skylight; he is scoring an opera whose chorus will be the hunger of New York. She trusses a yuletide feast—poussin, syllabub, manuscripts of mercy—and vaults copper gutters to lay it at his feet. To evade the stigma of her velvet blood, she calls herself only “Miss Smith,” shorthand stenographer to the Caner millions. Together they retype his sprawling libretto: her fingers learn the cadence of his catalectic hexameters, his metaphors drink her candlelight like claret. Fame arrives in a telegraphed purse of ten-thousand velvet dollars, but with it the revelation that his muse is a benefactor’s daughter. Pride detonates; the poet rails against the gilt cage of her patronage. Enter Marjorie’s father, Morris Caner, a robber-baron turned paternal alchemist, who stages a counterfeit bankruptcy, stripping his riches like paint from a master-fake canvas. In the sudden rubble of imagined poverty, the lovers re-meet as equals—two silhouettes against a winter moon now owned by no one—and the final chord of the opera swells off-stage, an apotheosis scored not for orchestra but for mercy, anonymity, and the democracy of emptied pockets.
Synopsis
When Marjorie Caner returns from abroad, she is quite lonely in her millionaire father's big house. Learning that a young poet, Anthony Quintard, is living in poverty next door while working on the libretto of a great opera, she skips across the roofs and brings him a Christmas banquet. The poet sees Marjorie, and knowing that he detests wealth, she pretends to be the secretary of the Caner family. Marjorie volunteers to type his libretto, and a close intimacy grows between them. Tony wins a $10,000 prize for his work, but is enraged when he discovers that Marjorie is an heiress. Morris Caner, mellowed under his daughter's tutelage, comes to the rescue by feigning financial ruin, and manages to reconcile the two lovers.
