A Woman's Awakening

Summary

Pastoral dew still clinging to her hem, Paula Letchworth alights from a wheezing branch-line train into the city’s chromium labyrinth, where shop-window mannequins gleam like idolatrous saints. Her country eyes—twin ponds of moonlit milk—absorb every reflected neon gasp, every scintillating lie. Coterie sirens in beaded lamé swirl her into their gilded orbit, whispering that happiness is a sequence of Charleston steps paid for with someone else’s soul. Allen Cotter, laconic architect of bridges literal and moral, watches from the margins, his gaze a quiet ledger tallying every squandered heartbeat. Paula, drunk on flattery and gin-fizz cosmology, mistakes the city’s roar for applause and weds Lawrence Topham—urban dandy, human sinkhole—who peels her finances like an overripe pear and bruises her psyche with the same casual precision. When the last cheque wilts, Paula barters dignity for escape: she will purchase her own emancipation, cash on the carcass of matrimony. Allen’s savings become her currency of last resort, yet Topham pockets the bribe only to renege, a carnivore relishing the squirm of prey. Enter the invalid mother, lungs rattling like parchment fans, who levies a single bullet as both dowry and dowager’s revenge. The revolver’s cough ricochets through corridors of suspicion: lovers eye one another across the chasm of presumed guilt, each silhouette haloed by the possibility of murder. Only a death-bed confession—fragile as pressed violets—can vacuum the moral soot, allowing two silhouettes to merge against the city’s sulfurous dawn.

Synopsis

When innocent country girl Paula Letchworth comes to the big city she foolishly allows herself to be influenced by her superficial friends while ignoring the wise counsel of Allen Cotter who truly cares for her. Paula's frivolous life leads her into a marriage with Lawrence Topham, a worthless louse who abuses her and squanders her money. Desperate, Paula offers to buy a divorce from Topham, and turns to Allen for the money. After Topham spends his fee, however, he refuses to go through with the deal, and Paula's invalid mother, unable to endure further cruelty to her daughter, shoots him. Paula and Allen both have reason to believe that the other is guilty of the murder, although the evidence points to suicide. Realizing that the lovers' suspicions are keeping them apart, Paula's mother confesses to the shooting shortly before her death, thus eliminating the barriers between Allen and Paula.