Precocious, ethereal Simion Satterwhite arrives at Yale University in 1878 at age 16, eager to escape his West Virginia fundamentalist upbringing. He meets 31-year-old art professor Doriskos Klionarios, who was sold in infancy by his Greek prostitute mother to a British lord. Together they embark on an emotionally reckless courtship, made all the more difficult by social bigotry and human jealousy.
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In 1878, young Satterwhite arrives at Yale University to discover what life holds for fellows with sharp aesthetic senses. He has never imagined anyone like Professor Doriskos Klionarios, who teaches art and poetry. The two are so dissimilar: a provincial youth and a cultured man of thirty, a foreigner who will never be a fine Englishman. But the tumultuous love affair scorned by their society is a gilded construct between one who believes that he is ready to know real love and a willing partner who understands that what the heart sees, it cannot forget; better to acquiesce to desire. Desire leads to danger, and danger to flight…from the rabid moralists of the college, the law, a peer’s obsessive jealousy. Their flight takes them to England in the rising glory of its Decadence, the artistic arena where Wilde was trying his luck.
