Summary
A flirtation blooms like oleander on the edge of a cliff: Phoebe Mabee, dewy-eyed yet restlessly antennaed to every male vibration, toys with Anson Newton while her engagement to Harley Jones—steady, industrious, the very blueprint of post-war American reliability—still glimmers on her finger. The engagement shatters; shards of promises skim across six months of silence, then miraculously reassemble into a marriage, a nursery, a semblance of domestic permanence. Harley’s firm dispatches him across an ocean just as summer’s heat unfurls; Phoebe, children in tow, retreats to a lake-side grand hotel where Newton re-materializes, sleek as a yacht’s prow. Letters cross wires, a child’s fever spikes, and Harley returns unannounced to find his wife powder-scented, glove-clad, on the verge of stepping into a candle-lit dining room under another man’s escort. One frantic carriage ride home, a bedside vigil, and the couple’s silhouettes fuse again—wiser, perhaps; scarred, certainly—against the nursery night-light.
Synopsis
Engaged to Harley Jones, fickle Phoebe Mabee flirts with Anson Newton. She and Harley, as a result, break their engagement, but within six months they are reconciled and married. Phoebe becomes a mother, and when Harley is sent abroad by his business firm she and her two children go to a summer resort where she renews her romance with Newton. Harley returns unexpectedly and finds Phoebe about to keep a dinner appointment with Mrs. Noxon, Newton's aunt, with Newton as her escort; and although Harley is annoyed and one of their children is ill, she insists on attending. At dinner she is reminded of her sick child and hurries home in time to calm it; husband and wife are then happily reconciled.
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