Summary
A matrimonial tapestry frays when Ralph Manson—once the picture of bourgeois respectability—succumbs to the phosphorescent allure of a footlight temptress, cleaving the covenant with his stoic wife Leonore Fenwick. Cast adrift, Leonore re-stitches her dignity by enrolling their impressionable son in the ivy’d sanctum of university, her solvency clandestinely underwritten by Robert Hadley, a velvet-gloved predator who barters tuition for eventual conjugality. Hadley’s vow—contingent upon the convenient death of his own spouse—proves as hollow as a stage-prop skull; once widowered, he reneges, tightening Leonore’s emotional noose. The revelation detonates when the adult son, intercepting a banknote breadcrumb, confronts the lovers, his righteous indignation scalding Hadley into a confession that unspools Leonore’s last threads of sanity. Gunfire crackles; Hadley crumples; Leonore, gaunt and luminous, stands trial for murder. The jury, swayed by the specter of temporary derangement, indicts Hadley posthumously for moral assassination. Mother and son, scarred yet breathing, exit the courthouse into a tentative dawn where filial love and a steadfast sweetheart promise a fragile, flickering redemption.
Synopsis
Ralph Manson, who marries Leonore Fenwick, is led astray by a stage siren. His wife obtains a divorce, and is aided in sending her son to college by Robert Hadley, who induces her to live with him under promise of marriage as soon as he can obtain a divorce. His wife dies and he refuses to keep his promise to Mrs. Manson. The son, finding a check given by Hadley to his mother, has his suspicions aroused. The son demands an explanation, but his mother declares it was only a business matter. Then follows a scene between the son and his mother's lover, in which Hadley, after being enraged by the boy's words, disregards the plea of Mrs. Manson and tells the son the whole story. This causes the mother to lose her reason and she shoots Hadley. Mrs. Manson is tried for murder. The jury acquits her on the ground of temporary insanity, holding Hadley responsible for her loss of reason. Eugene has been in love with a girl who, in spite of the whole sordid affair and parental objection, sticks to him, and the play ends with the mother and son reunited, and the son wins the girl with whom he is in love.
