Summary
A Gower funeral strips Mildred and her mother to threadbare gentility; the casket’s polished oak mocks their hollow purse. In the drawing-room’s dusk, mother proclaims the single remaining asset—Mildred’s face—must be mortgaged to the highest bidder. Enter Stanley Baird, the boy-next-door with prospects too modest for the ledger of survival, betrothed elsewhere before Mildred can exhale her longing. Enter Presbury, a fossil who mistakes the Gowers for hidden treasure; discovering lead instead of gold, he weaponizes scorn, turning the house into a gladiatorial arena where every sneer lands like a whip. To rid herself of the stench of failure, Mildred allows herself to be auctioned to General Siddall—an oligarch who collects wives like rare porcelain, parading them but never letting them breathe. The marriage is a gilded cage: sapphires dangle, but no coin jingles in her reticule; she is a statuette dusted daily, informed her value is decorative. When she bolts, Siddall’s empire of contracts unravels—Keith’s sleuthing reveals a living lunatic spouse, rendering Mildred’s vows void. Independence becomes a scaffold built note by note: she starves the ego, feeds the diaphragm, trades velvet for scales, until her once-uncertain soprano slices through opera-house rafters. Two men wait in the wings—the steadfast patron Baird, now unshackled, and the incisive lawyer Keith who once diagnosed her softness. With a self-forged fortune in her throat, she chooses neither obligation nor rescue but resonance itself, closing a circle that began in a cemetery and ends under her own spotlight.
Synopsis
At the death of John Gower, his widow and daughter, Mildred, find themselves with only a few thousand dollars, as the family lived almost up to the limit of Cower's income. Mildred's mother tells her it is necessary that she marry money. Mildred is fond of Stanley Baird, but her hopes in this direction are shattered by the announcement of his engagement to another woman. Mrs. Gower marries Presbury, an elderly man who thinks she is wealthy, and when he learns the truth he begins taunting Mildred until she is willing to do anything to escape from her humiliating position. Presbury arranges a marriage between Mildred and a multimillionaire, General Siddall. The bride soon discovers that while her husband will buy anything for her she wants, so that he can make an impression upon the world with her beauty, he will not give her any money. This forces her to realize that she is barely more than a piece of furniture in the General's establishment. She leaves him, and meeting Baird learns that he and his wife have separated. He undertakes to furnish her with funds for the cultivation of her voice for an operatic career, with the hope that one day they will be free to marry. Mildred makes slow progress. Her voice is good but uncertain. She meets a young lawyer, Donald Keith, who tells her that she will never succeed because she is too fond of luxury and ease. Meanwhile she discovers through Keith's investigation that she was not legally married to General Siddall, as his first wife was still living, confined in an insane asylum. The General has made many attempts to get her to come back to him, but she refuses. Finally she declines to take any more money from Baird, and by economy, self-denial and hard work succeeds in her musical ambition. Having achieved her independence she is now free to choose between Stanley Baird and Donald Keith, to both of whom she owes a debt of gratitude. Her choice is a happy one, and leaves the story of the life of this typical American girl perfectly rounded out.
