Infatuation

Phyllis Ladd, only daughter of a railway president, loses her mother at twelve and grows up her widowed father's closest companion — until she falls headlong for an actor, Adair, whose face she cannot get out of her mind. The infatuation sets father against daughter, and it takes a good-natured dramatist, Rolls Reece, to bring the two men to shake hands. Lloyd Osbourne was Stevenson's stepson and collaborator, and wrote comedies of American manners after his death; this one is kinder to its heroine than its title suggests. Fifty-seven plates by painters including John Sloan and William Merritt Chase carry the reader through the city streets, studios and gathering places of Phyllis's New York.