The Woman Game

Amy Terrell, a porcelain beauty with a gambler’s heart, pirouettes through the velvet parlors of the declining Knickerbocker set, trading quips like calling cards while her bankrupt mother clings to chandeliers that have already been sold for scrap. At Mrs. Van Trant’s lakeside manor—a Beaux-Arts mausoleum scented with camphor and old scandals—Amy is ordered to bait Andrew Masters, the steel magnate who loathes the very silk that girdles these drawing rooms. She slips into the skin of a demure relic: dropped consonants, averted gaze, a hymn on her lips instead of a curse. Masters, allergic to coquettes, finds himself magnetized by this counterfeit innocence; their courtship unfolds in chiaroscuro, half in moonlit boathouses, half in ledgers where he calculates the cost of love. When the masquerade shatters—his own private detective coughing up receipts for her dressmaker bills—Masters’ rebuke is swift and puritanical, a public excommunication beneath gaslit chandeliers. Yet the dowager Van Trant, cornered by creditors, hatches a last-ditch vilification: she will salt the rumor that Amy has tumbled with a debt-ridden cadet whose only collateral is his epaulettes. The scheme ricochets; Masters sees the machinations, recognizes the authentic tremor beneath Amy’s performance, and in a final tracking shot that glides past toppled champagne towers and shredded IOUs, he claims the woman who was always the genuine article beneath the greasepaint.