The Education of Mr. Pipp
Summary
A sudden fortune—seventy-five gleaming zeros forged in Pittsburgh soot—propels the Pipp clan from iron-smoke alleys to Fifth Avenue’s gilded cages, where parquet floors echo with hollow ambition and chandeliers drip borrowed light; matriarch Pipp, craving aristocratic gloss, hires a velvet-voiced charlatan masquerading as comte, whose conjugations of subjonctif veil larceny as deftly as silk gloves conceal nimble fingers. While mother perfects her r’s, elder daughter Iris trades glances across a carousel of polo ponies with a taciturn riding instructor whose cracked boots belie coronets; sibling Daphne, all restless curls and ledger-ink daydreams, pins her heart on the family’s steadfast comptroller, a young man whose moral compass still points north even amid ticker-tape tempests. A forged check—seventy-five modest dollars inflated to princely thousands—detonates their transatlantic idyll, sending the newly minted millionaires across the Atlantic toward imagined ancestral halls, unknowingly tailed by a Pinkerton bloodhound, an English heir incognito, and a ledger clerk who would trade ledgers for love. In Kentish drawing rooms identities crisscross like fox-hunt trails: footmen whisper, dowagers scheme, and the false comte’s confederates stalk tiaras and throats. Paris intervenes with gaslight menace—poisoned cordial, rooftop chases, the Prefecture’s sabers rattling over cobblestones—until the matriarch, stripped of illusions, begs for the sooty skies of home, while Cupid, battered but unbeaten, pairs fortune’s children with conscience’s heirs beneath a confetti of reconciliations.
Synopsis
The members of a Pittsburgh family are trying to break into society through the million dollars obtained by their father's selling his business to the Steel Trust. They move to New York, establish themselves in a Fifth Avenue residence, and backed by the father's money endeavor to penetrate New York society. The mother in her ambition engages a bogus French nobleman to teach herself and her daughters the French language. This Frenchman is in reality one of a group of crooks. The elder daughter at Durland's meets a young riding master named Fitzgerald, and it is a case of love at first sight. The young riding master is in reality Lord Fitzmaurice, son of an old English family. The younger daughter is desperately fond of John Willing, who has been her father's manager in his Pittsburgh business and who has been established in the bank that her father presides over in New York City. The family decides to make a trip to England. Just before they leave, the French teacher is given a check for $75 in payment for his lessons and he in connection with the other two members of his band raises this check to $75,000 and gets it cashed while the Pipps are on the liner bound for Europe. John Willing and young Fitzmaurice meet and learn of each other's feelings towards the two Pipp girls. Willing suspects that the check is bad and gets in touch with Mr. Pipp by cable. On learning that the check is a forgery, he engages Pinkerton to assist in recovering the $75,000, and young Fitzmaurice decides to accompany them. Mrs. Pipp has a letter of introduction to Lady Viola, the mother of young Fitzgerald, and the Pipps go to her home for a visit. Pinkerton and the two young men arrive in England shortly and also go to the Fitzmaurice home. The young Lord gets his mother and the servants to keep his identity a secret and many tine scenes of mistaken identity and cross purposes are the result. The crooks are finally located in Paris and the Pipps, accompanied by Pinkerton, go there. Two of the band try to steal a valuable tiara from Mrs. Pipp, and one of them. Count Charmarot, attempts the life of Mr. Pipp with poison thinking that with him out of the way there is an opportunity for him to make love to and marry the impressionable Mrs. Pipp. Pinkerton, with the assistance of the French Prefect of Police, blocks their plans and brings about their arrest. Mrs. Pipp, realizing the mistake she has made, begs Mr. Pipp to take her back to Pittsburgh. The love affairs of the young people are successfully carried on and end in happy marriages.
