Mr. Incoul’s Misadventure

Mr. Incoul

Harmon Incoul inherited a mile of Manhattan real estate and a temperament hardened by a loveless boyhood; at nearly forty he emerges from mourning to marry the beautiful, penniless Maida Barhyte. His measured speech and compressed lips conceal a vindictiveness once capable of dragging a schoolmate senseless from a desk. When he begins to suspect the world around him, his wealth and patience become instruments of a cold, deliberate watchfulness that shapes everything to come.

Lenox Leigh

Lenox Leigh moves through Parisian clubs and Biarritz seasons with the confidence of a man who recites poetry well and reads husbands poorly. He is mad about Mirette, the ballet's reigning sensation, and coolly calculates how to keep Mr. Incoul treading the margin between vigilance and blindness. His charm is real, his judgment is not, and the accusation that shatters him at the card table is the first proof that someone has been counting his sins.

Miss Maida Barhyte

Maida Barhyte receives Mr. Incoul in a shabby boardinghouse parlor and tells him plainly that her mother wishes the match and she does not, yet the debts and the disappeared inheritance leave her little room. She has the beauty of a young Olympian and a frankness that disarms servants and suitors alike. Her honesty in that first interview makes her later silences and unexplained departures the more unsettling, and the marriage she accepts becomes the hinge on which the whole misadventure turns.

Mr. Blydenburg

Mr. Blydenburg comes to the great Madison Avenue house of an evening, sets up the chessboard, and chatters while Incoul's solitude deepens. He is present at Mrs. Bachelor's reception with his daughter, eager for travel talk of Granada and Ronda, and his genial, panting curiosity makes him a useful barometer of what society knows and suspects. His friendship gives Incoul a rare human thread, and his innocent questions about Spain help draw the characters toward the journey where everything will be tested.

Mirette

Mirette arrives at the opera house trailing rumors from Biarritz and a Russian named Balaguine, and when she crosses the foyer men moisten their lips and find them still parched. She is the principal dancer of the new ballet, and Lenox Leigh waits for her in the wings to take her scarf and whisper. Mr. Incoul reads her face and sees nothing but unsatiated appetite, and that reading sets his mind working toward the scheme that will eventually reach Lenox through her.

Mrs. Incoul

She liked to fill the Madison Avenue palace with guests and entertainments, while her husband cared for society as much as for negro minstrels yet insisted she give parties anyway. In the winter after their fifteenth anniversary she caught a chill, took to her bed, and died forty-eight hours later, and the world promptly said Incoul would not marry again. Her death is the silence against which his second marriage and all its suspicions acquire their weight.