Summary
Rector’s, a Broadway lobster-palace where champagne fizzles louder than jazz, sees its mirrored mosaics catch the twirl of Loute Sedaine—Parisian étoile turned New York curiosity—whose legs sketch arabesques of defiance against velvet banquettes. Andy Tandy, velvet-collared boulevardier, mistakes her kinetic grace for a courtesan’s availability, while Richard Lawrence, granite-jawed yet tremulous, reads in her same steps the ghost of a woman he must idealize or perish. Between these refracted gazes Loute pirouettes a double life: midnight danseuse for the thrill of footlights, dawn matron of a quiet Brooklyn flat where a forgotten husband keeps her wedding gloves pressed in an encyclopedia. When Tandy’s pursuit escalates from silver flattery to backstage siege, Lawrence’s chivalry mutates into covetous rescue, revealing that both men have courted a silhouette, not a soul. The final curtain yanks the scrim: Tandy’s ancestral mansion houses a consumptive wife and a daughter who still believes papá is «at sea,» while Loute’s legal spouse arrives at the theater door with train tickets to Naples, proving the dancer’s sole indiscretion was believing adventure could be worn like a detachable collar.
Loute Sedaine, a French dancer and known along Broadway as "The Girl from Rector's," attracts the attention of Andy Tandy, a man about town, who has little regard for the reputation of the girl. Richard Lawrence also meets her and for the time being thinks that he loves her and protects her from the advances of Tandy. Complications arise and in the end the fact that Tandy has a wife and daughter is disclosed and also that "The Girl From Rector's" is a happily married woman who has become a dancer only because of the love of art and thirst for adventure.
