The Dream-maker Man

In a glittering New York salon, the formidable Marchesa turns a simple reading into a duel of wit, probing Miss Wayne's composure until the young woman's polished restraint begins to crack. What first seems like romantic trouble proves far more painful: Melissa Wayne is haunted by her twenty-fifth birthday, by the ugliness of her cramped life, and by the fear that she has been denied beauty, freedom, and a self worth loving. As the Marchesa—aging, glamorous, and keenly aware of her own fading charms—draws her out over sherry and biscuits, the two women discover an uneasy kinship in their private hunger for a larger, more vivid existence. Melissa returns to her boardinghouse and office routine with renewed despair, clinging to poetry, rejecting easy consolation, and even considering the abyss of suicide. Around her, the Marchesa continues to shape the emotional weather of the story, manipulating guests at Four Oaks, sharpening romantic tensions, and unsettling Melissa's ties to Luke and Murdock. A sudden death in Hawaii, a thwarted courtship, and the Marchesa's polished sympathy deepen the novel's atmosphere of loneliness, class pressure, self-doubt, and the painful gap between the life one has and the life one longs to live. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.