Summary
Lady Windermere, a much-married hostess who collects celebrities as her 'lions', holds a crowded reception at Bentinck House and shows off her cheiromantist, Mr. Septimus Podgers, a stout little man in gold spectacles. He reads the hands of the Duchess of Paisley, her daughter Lady Flora and Sir Thomas, and his uncomfortable accuracy makes some guests refuse to be read at all. When Lord Arthur Savile holds out his hand, Podgers goes pale and sweats, then offers only a voyage and the loss of a distant relative. Alone with him later, Lord Arthur promises a cheque for a hundred guineas and hears what the palmist really saw.
Lord Arthur rushes out into the night convinced that his hand shows murder. He wanders through the slums, stops before a poster offering a reward for a wanted murderer, and at dawn watches the market wagons rolling in to Covent Garden. By noon, bathed and calm, he reasons that he cannot marry Sybil Merton while the crime hangs over him. He chooses his second cousin, Lady Clementina Beauchamp, because he is fond of her and gains nothing by her death, buys aconitine by pretending it is for a rabid dog, and gives it to her in a silver bonbonnière as an American cure for heartburn. He then postpones the wedding and leaves for Venice.
A telegram brings news of Lady Clementina's death, and Lord Arthur returns happily to London, where the wedding is fixed for June. While clearing her house in Curzon Street, Sybil finds the bonbonnière with the capsule still inside: the old lady died naturally. The wedding is put off again. Through the Russian Count Rouvaloff, Lord Arthur finds Herr Winckelkopf, a genial conspirator in Soho, who sells him a clock set to explode at noon on Friday and sends it to the Dean of Chichester. A chatty letter from the Dean's daughter, Jane Percy, reveals that it gave only a puff of smoke and knocked over its figure of Liberty, and that Reggie now uses it for small explosions in the schoolroom.
Resolved to leave everything to Destiny, Lord Arthur walks the Thames Embankment late at night and finds Podgers leaning over the parapet near Cleopatra's Needle. He seizes him by the legs and throws him into the river. Days later the St. James's reports the 'Suicide of a Cheiromantist', which a coroner's jury blames on overwork. Lord Arthur rushes to Sybil, and they marry within weeks, with the Dean reading the service. Years later at Alton Priory, Lady Windermere calls Podgers a dreadful impostor who tried to borrow money and made love to her, but Lord Arthur says he believes in cheiromancy because he owes it Sybil.