A Beautiful Possibility

A cultivated widower lives in an elegant West Indian villa filled with naturalist curiosities and raises his affectionate young daughter after leaving New England for health reasons. Concerned that the island’s informal, bohemian household will not prepare her for the rigid respectability of his only remaining relatives back home, he contemplates sending her north and exchanges letters about her future. Scenes of daily life — servants preparing for a camp meeting, the father’s impatience with religious cant, and warm father–daughter interactions — set up tensions between sincerity and hypocrisy, private affection and social expectation.