Summary
Walsingham Van Dorn—ink-stained literary middleman, perennial also-ran in Manhattan’s twilight book world—receives a telegram so luminous it seems to burn the stale office air: forty million in negotiable assets, bequeathed by twin uncles whose racketeering brilliance had once terrorized half of Wall Street. The windfall transmutes the schlub into a silk-robed sphinx overnight; he abdicates hustle, hires the impeccably starched attorney Wilkins to pilot the fortune, and sinks into baronial languor inside a marble menagerie of echoing halls. But opulence curdles at moonrise when Desiree Lane—feline, phosphorescent in righteous fury—materializes at his bedside, brandishing promissory ghosts: two million wrested from her father by Van Dorn’s deceased kin, now owed with compound interest in blood and shame. Conscience detonated, Van Dorn lunges for restitution only to discover Wilkins has absconded with the entire war-chest, leaving behind a mocking ledger of zeroes. Thus the mismatched pair—he, a bumbling plutocrat in monogrammed pajamas; she, a tempest in a silk slip—hurtle onto night-trains and into firetrap hotels, their quest a carnival of false leads, sheriffs, and speakeasy sirens. When flames reduce their last refuge to cinders, the two bedraggled fugitives stand penniless beneath magnesium flashbulbs of scandal, wed in a dawn ceremony brokered by gawkers and gospels alike. Two years of thrift-store bliss later, Wilkins—gaunt, contrite, psychically shredded by the Midas curse—returns the embezzled mountain of cash in battered trunks. The reunited couple, now seasoned in the alchemy of insolvency, stare at the shimmering pile and wonder whether happiness can survive the lethal radiance of too many millions.
Synopsis
Walsingham Van Dorn, a rather unsuccessful book agent, is stunned to learn that he has inherited forty million dollars from his two uncles. Van Dorn asks his attorney Wilkins to handle the responsibilities entailed in managing the fortune and then retires to his mansion. One evening, however, he is awakened by a young woman named Desiree Lane, who refuses to leave until the two million dollars that his uncles swindled away from her father is restored. Van Dorn tries to return the money but discovers that Wilkins has stolen it and fled. Van Dorn and Desiree set out to find him, but when the hotel in which they have stopped for the night burns down, they are left standing in the street clad only in pajamas. To avoid a scandal, they marry and happily settle down. Two years later, Wilkins, unable to handle the fortune, returns it, but the young couple wonders whether they will continue to be happy as millionaires.
