Henry Gower dies, and his widow and daughter discover that the comfortable fortune they lived on never existed. Mildred, brought up for nothing but a good marriage, sells herself to a rich and repellent older man, finds the bargain unbearable, and leaves him to train her voice for the opera stage, with talent, debts and no protector. Phillips was the muckraker whose Treason of the Senate so enraged Roosevelt that the President coined the word to insult him; he was shot dead in the street at forty-three, and this novel, published after his death, is his most sustained argument that a woman who marries for money has made a trade. Fifty-nine plates, from Bierstadt to Tissot, trace the world of fashion, courtship and hard bargains that traps Mildred, and the landscapes that lie beyond it.