Summary
A fin-de-siècle Manhattan mansion, all velvet and gaslight, becomes the incandescent crucible for Clyde Fitch’s scalding parable of desire: the widowed banker Hargate—equal parts Midas and Mausoleum—projects his fossilized grief onto a pearl-strung daughter, Enid, whose heart already pulses for the impecunious sculptor Alan, a poet of plaster and perilous idealism. Into this tinderbox glides the Countess de la Rue, a sable-draped siren nursing gambling debts sharp enough to slice trust, conscripting the fragile Adele—part ingénue, part moth—into a clandestine liaison with the dissolute Lord Standish, a man whose carnal appetites burn like phosphorus. As stock-market ledgers hemorrhage crimson, so too do drawing-room allegiances: letters vanish, betrothal rings ricochet across parquet floors, and a single forged signature detonates reputations with the silent violence of a snuffed wick. In the final reel, a candlelit conservatory becomes an arena of reckoning; Enid, draped in white organdy that glows like moth-wings, confronts the Countess amid a lattice of shadows, while Alan’s unveiled marble—an aching Psyche—stands as mute witness to the scalding truth that some hungers devour both flame and flyer. The curtain falls not on death but on exile: the Countess banished to a fog-choked steamer, Alan’s masterpiece cracked at the base, and Enid’s gloved hand slipping from her father’s cuff—three residues of a war waged between appetite and rectitude.
