Summary
A gilded Edwardian marriage combusts when Dudley Kent, uxorious yet restive, succumbs to the copper-bright allure of Grace Vaughan—an incandescent free spirit whose laughter seems to re-write gravity itself. Abandoning wife and hearth, Kent pirouettes into a sun-drenched idyll with Grace until a single telegram—his little boy’s death—shatters the mirage. Guilt metastasizes into savage recrimination: he flagellates Grace as the serpent who lured him from domestic sacrament, then slams the door on their paradise. Cast into penury, Grace drifts through rain-slick streets until a perfumed procuress, Madame Marie D’Arcy, entices her inside a velvet-roped underworld where gaslight bruises the air and every smile has a tariff. Grace’s body becomes currency; her soul, collateral. Salvation arrives in the form of a seemingly altruistic young swain who spirits her beyond the brothel’s gilded cage, yet the escape hatch is booby-trapped with fresh betrayals, blackmail letters, and the lingering ghost of Kent’s accusatory gaze. What unfolds is a fever-dream of penitence, commodified desire, and the queasy arithmetic of blame—a narrative that asks whether redemption is ever more than another transaction.
Young Dudley Kent falls in love with Grace Vaughan and leaves his wife for her. The two are very happy until Kent learns that his young son has died. He blames Grace for "luring" him away from his family and leaves her. Alone and broke, Grace is tricked into working at a "sporting house" run by madam Marie D'Arcy. Desperate to escape her circumstances, she meets a young man who she believes can rescue her from her predicament. He eventually does, but complications ensue.
