The Master of the House

Summary

Domestic ennui festers in sepia parlours where a husband, ossified by routine, beholds his wife as a faded sampler rather than a living companion; into this emotional mausoleum glides a governess whose city-bred anecdotes sparkle like forbidden champagne. Entranced by her promise of perpetual youth amid electric boulevards, the patriarch abdicates hearth, heirs and history, only to discover the governess’s urban Eden swarming with velvet-clad parasites who strip his wallet and warp his arteries. When the mirage dissolves he crawls back, bruised of rib and pride, to the wife he scorned—now a Madonna of quiet forgiveness—while the camera lingers on a rocking chair that keeps time like a remorseful metronome.

Synopsis

The husband is bored to death by years of association with his wife, whom he deems old-fashioned and settled. A governess, young and beautiful, comes to the house. The father, master of the house in every sense of the word, is infatuated with the governess's description of life in the city where one remains young even at four-score years. Many conversations occur between the man and the governess, and one day he tells his wife that he is tired of her and that he is going away to the city with a younger and prettier woman. Time passes and the master of the house sees the other side of the governess. Her family is a lot of parasites who live on him. The man, broken in health, his spirit revolting against present conditions, feels a longing away down in his heart for his old-fashioned wife and their three children and the old home that is a home. In a frenzied burst of anger he strikes her, casts aside the woman and the unpleasant associations with her and, older, wiser, sadder and penitent, he returns to his wife and fireside.