Summary
In the smoke-choked shadows of an industrial town, Jane—a mill-girl whose marrow has been powdered into debt—surrenders her name to Ambrose, the iron-sinewed proprietor whose mansion looms like a mausoleum over the workers’ terraces. Years pass in gilded captivity: chandeliers drip wax on her shoulders, champagne fizz burns her tongue, every silk gown a shroud stitched with invisible shackles. When she finally walks out, the gates clang behind her like a judge’s gavel; she carries no dowry except the echo of gossip. Enter Richard Newton, a man carved from the same flawed marble—gambling debts, duel scars, a past littered with broken promises. Their wedding is a candlelit compromise, the child a fragile treaty. Yet the ledger of love demands its reckoning: Richard learns that Jane once bartered her body for bread and coal, and his pride flares like phosphorus. He banishes her, only to confront his own reflection in cracked shop-windows, realizing he has sentenced her for crimes he himself patented. In a dusk thick with soot and contrition, he kneels; she lifts him, not because the past is erased, but because it has been forged into something harder than forgiveness—an alloy of mercy and self-knowledge.
Synopsis
Tired of poverty, Jane finally accepts the advances of Ambrose, the wealthy owner of the factory in which she works, and becomes his mistress. Years later, long after she has left Ambrose, Jane falls in love with Richard Newton, whose own past, like hers, hardly stands out as scrupulous. They get married and have a child, but then Richard finds out that Jane had been a kept woman, and insists on a separation. He soon begins to think about his own past indiscretions, however, and realizes the hypocrisy of judging Jane by a higher standard than the one by which he has lived. As a result, he asks her forgiveness, and she eagerly takes him back.
