Summary
Iris Carroll is a woman forged in the soot and bitterness of a failing railroad boardinghouse. Her life, dictated by her father’s incompetence and her mother’s terminal resentment toward the opposite sex, has left her with a singular, icy ambition. When her mother passes, Iris doesn’t mourn; she liquidates. Shaking off the dust of her drab upbringing, she reinvents herself as a high-society predator at a luxury hotel. Her target is Jeff Payne, a naive scion of immense wealth. Iris secures a proposal with surgical precision, but her arrival at the Payne estate triggers a domestic collapse. Franklin Payne, the patriarch, becomes so bewitched by her calculated charm that he attempts to usurp his son’s place. The chaos peaks when Diana Payne, the family matriarch, recruits her brother Gregory—a sea captain and self-proclaimed misogynist—to neutralize Iris. What follows is a psychological collision on the high seas where two people defined by their mutual hatred of intimacy are forced to confront their own reflections.
Synopsis
Through the faults of her father, Iris Carroll and her mother are reduced to operating a boardinghouse near a railroad. Iris, who has absorbed her mother's hatred of men, and especially her hatred of her own drab surroundings, closes the house upon her mother's death, and with her remaining money determines to use men to further her career. At a fashionable hotel, she meets young Jeff Payne, scion of a wealthy family; the youth becomes infatuated, and Iris quickly accepts his proposal. Franklin Payne, Jeff's father, invites her to the family estate, and falling under her charms, he tries to persuade Iris to marry him rather than his son. In despair at the wreck Iris is making of their home, Diana Payne turns for aid to her Uncle Gregory, a sea captain and a pronounced woman-hater. Intrigued by his indifference, Iris tries unsuccessfully to arouse his admiration. By a ruse, he lures her to his boat where they realize their mutual love.
