Summary
A celebrated cellist’s townhouse hums with Brahms, yet beneath the parquet civility a tinderbox of desire smolders: Doris Marshall, porcelain heiress to her father’s gilded name, is pledged to Franklyn White, a man whose affection calcifies the instant Viola Sherwin—ward, will-o’-the-wisp, and unclaimed constellation—drifts through the music room. Viola, allergic to possession, escapes to Philadelphia’s ink-stained newsrooms, where Harold Foster, a rake in reporter’s garb, beguiles her into a clandestine matrimony that feels more like a dare than a vow. Months later, Harold—now sporting his mother’s diamonds and the ennui of the over-privileged—waltzes back into Manhattan’s most phosphorescent ball, instantly betrothed to Doris, ignorance squared. Viola, unwilling to let innocence be devoured by chandeliers and lies, crashes the Barrett mansion; a pistol barks, Harold collapses like a marionette with severed strings, and Viola stands cruciform in the smoke. Yet the twist is baroque: Peter Barrett, haunted by the specter of his wife Lauretta—another casualty of Harold’s serial seduction—claims the murder, exorcising both guilt and narrative expectation. The bullet, meant for a ghost, liberates the living: Viola walks into foggy dawn, Doris and Franklyn rekindle a love scrubbed clean of artifice, and the city’s nocturne resumes, indifferent.
Synopsis
Distinguished musician William Marshall has a daughter, Doris, and a ward, Viola Sherwin. Franklyn White, who is engaged to Doris, becomes smitten with Viola, but she is not interested and leaves for Philadelphia, where she becomes a reporter and meets wayward Harold Foster, who falls in love with her and proposes a secret marriage. Later, Harold attends a ball in New York, given by his mother; disregarding his marriage, he falls in love with Doris, to whom he becomes engaged. To save Doris, Viola confronts Harold at the Barrett home, and it appears that she has shot and killed him. However, Peter Barrett confesses to the crime, committed in the jealous belief that Viola was his wife Lauretta, whom Harold had previously courted. Viola is free and Doris and Franklyn are reconciled.
