The Square Deal

Alys Gilson, dewy-eyed but blade-sharp, flees the velvet prison of her ancestral manor for gaslit avenues where the Culture Club recites manifestos on unshackled desire. Under the sulphuric charisma of Peyton Le Moyne—a dandy Mephistopheles in velvet loafers—she signs a matrimonial pact predicated on perpetual opt-out clauses. Enter Thurston Bruce, earnest jurist from beyond the salon’s incense haze; he swallows the poisoned contract, believing love can be legislated like a street-car ordinance. Soon the apartment becomes a 24-hour symposium of berets and absinthe, while Bruce’s patience erodes faster than newsprint in rain. In the coup de grâce, he declares the union void—he’s smitten with Marion Hamilton, a secretary who promises doilies, fidelity, and a quiet breakfast table. Alys, gutted, retreats to her parents’ mausoleum of respectability only to discover Bruce lounging in the conservatory: the entire rupture was a theatrical shock-therapy engineered to cure her of bohemianism and make her heart kneel.