Summary
Vi Marchmont, a flapper whose dance-card already overflows with thirteen beaux, flirts with a fourteenth admirer under the chandeliers of a Jazz-Age manor; her industrial-baron sire and hawk-eyed Aunt Letitia, scandalized by the percussive gossip, decree an immediate embargo on romance. To escape the gilded leash, Vi orchestrates a exquisite charade of cardiac frailty—white silk fainting-couch, trembling pulse, the family physician’s complicit murmur—winning exile to the countryside, that Eden of hedgerows and hush. There, among the lavender drifts of her father’s neglected acreage, she discovers Richard Hardy, the taciturn horticulturist whose soil-blackened hands read like erotic sonnets against her porcelain skin. Letitia, scenting class treachery, summarily exiles the gardener; Van Ness, velvet-gloved predator of privilege, whispers that Hardy keeps a secret wife tucked away like a pressed violet. Undaunted, Vi apprentices herself to the domestic arts—scrubbing, kneading, stoking copper boilers—her defiance a slow blooming rose. Hardy, rehired by a distant estate, confides his ache to a mother who carries more sorrow than suitcase; she, in turn, seeks Vi, weaving maternal benediction between the two conspirators of desire. One moon-liquored night Vi occupies Hardy’s cottage while he folds his six-foot frame into her butter-yellow roadster, chastity preserved by chivalry’s razor edge. Dawn finds them exchanging vows of elopement beside a dew-glazed scarecrow, the horizon a cathedral of possibility.
Synopsis
Vi Marchmont, who has thirteen suitors and is becoming interested in a fourteenth, is ordered by her father and Aunt Letitia to call a halt. With the aid of the family doctor, Vi convinces the family that she has a heart ailment and is sent to the country to recuperate. Once there, she takes an interest in Richard Hardy, the gardener on her father's estate, but Vi's aunt discharges Hardy when she discovers Vi's infatuation with him. Van Ness, a wealthy young suitor, tries to convince Vi that Hardy is married; Vi, however, learns housekeeping, confident that Hardy will return. Hardy obtains a landscaping job, but confides his unhappiness to his mother, who visits Vi. In spite of Hardy's objections, Vi spends the night at his house, while he sleeps in her roadster. The following morning Vi informs him that she will not be happy until they are married, and they agree to elope.
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