Summary
Lily Gibbs, a luminous guttersnipe with bruised cheekbones and a heart still uncalloused, is drafted into a ghoulish masquerade by two ghouls of the metropolitan night: Dr. Joe Parmenter, whose surgical gloves mask the tremor of a born vivisectionist, and Jim Corling, her sometime paramour, a man whose smile arrives a half-second late, like a counterfeit coin. Together they spirit Lily into the mausoleum-elegance of Mrs. Wade’s mansion, rebranding the waif as the late prodigal son’s secret bride. Séance candles sputter; ectoplasm is conjured from cigar smoke and guilt; a mother’s grief is harvested like a ripe orchard. Suddenly the foundling is draped in sable and pearls, her laughter echoing through galleries of ancestral portraits that seem to sneer at the fraud. Yet the con is pierced from within when Arthur Brent—Mrs. Wade’s attorney, a man who still believes in the alphabet of honor—offers Lily not diamonds but a daisy, a small sun that wilts her cynicism. The moment she tastes unmerited tenderness, the whole edifice of larceny begins to flake like gilt on a collapsing altarpiece. When she learns that Dr. Joe’s scalpel did not merely heal but once slit the throat of the true heir, her loyalties invert: she becomes the Trojan horse inside her own scam. In a final reel that plays like a fever confession, both villains perish—one by the other’s avarice, one by the iron law of narrative justice—leaving Lily trembling before the dowager she defrauded. Mrs. Wade, carved hollow by loss, lifts the girl’s chin, sees her dead son’s longing eyes reflected there, and bestows absolution with the quiet magnanimity of a queen pardoning a thief who returned the crown jewels tarnished but intact. Lily steps into daylight on Brent’s arm, no longer a counterfeit but a self-forged woman, the scarlet of her sins washed to coral in the merciless morning.
Synopsis
Lily Gibbs gets involved with two crooks--Dr. Joe Parmenter and Jim Corling, her lover. They pass the girl off as the daughter-in-law of wealthy Mrs. Wade, whose son is dead. At a seance Mrs. Wade is made to believe that Lily is the girl her son married, and takes her into her home and lavishes riches upon her. Lily then falls in love with Arthur Brent, who treats her with a kindness she has never known. Experiencing this new emotion, she wishes to break with her criminal crowd and does so when she discovers that Dr. Joe killed Mrs. Wade's son. When both Dr. Joe and Corling meet their deaths, and after receiving Mrs. Wade's forgiveness for her deception, Lily marries Brent.
