Summary
In the gaslit twilight of an Ivy League campus, porcelain-skinned Howard Sherbrooke—scion of vaults, corridors of gilt-edged ledgers—casts his patrician gaze on Ethel Stratton, a moon-moth among the lecture-hall lamps. His wallet yawns open for Dick Leslie, prairie scholarship boy whose knuckles still smell of loam and ambition. Both men drink the same dandelion-wine light that spills across Ethel’s collarbone, yet only Howard believes possession is a birthright. Commencement arrives like a satin curtain fall; Howard concocts a sham union, a paper-thin ruse to parade Ethel as mistress in Manhattan’s marble lobbies. Dick, love gnawing his ribs, volunteers to fetch a counterfeit cleric but instead drags in a bona-fide minister, sealing the oath with ink that will scald them all. Months of Brooklyn bliss—rain-streaked windows, shared stockings drying on the radiator—shatter when old man Sherbrooke’s letter arrives: blue-blood betrothal to Beatrice Ford, heiress to a coal-black fortune, partnership in the family’s legal colossus. Howard’s spine turns to ice; he renounces Ethel, branding her a plaything, blaming Dick’s “botched” pageantry. Ethel, now quickening with child, writes a single venomous letter to the west, a paper arrow soaked in kerosene. Dick gallops east, wrests proof from the trembling minister, and storms the cathedral just as the organ blares for the Ford merger—sorry, wedding. Ethel collapses between pews like a saint pierced by revelation; Dick waves the marriage certificate like a war flag. They sprint to the Ford mansion, brandish the document, and Randolph Ford roars for police shackles. Cornered, Howard retreats to mahogany solitude; a pistol crack writes the epitaph of privilege. Epilogue: spring buries the magnolia blossoms, Ethel’s waist swells with lawful promise, and Dick’s calloused hand slips a ring of redemption onto her finger.
Synopsis
Howard Sherbrooke, a wealthy senior at a law university, is infatuated with Ethel Stratton, a girl who is a favorite with the students. Dick Leslie, his chum, is also in love with her. Dick is from the west, working his way through college, and Howard has assisted him financially. Howard does not know of Dick's love for Ethel. After graduation, Howard, whose interest in Ethel has ripened into love, realizes that his family and social friends will not tolerate her as his wife. He plans a mock marriage, intending to take her to New York with him. He tells Dick of this proposed arrangement, and asks him to get someone to impersonate a minister for the ceremony. Dick veils his indignation, but agrees to carry out the plan. Instead, he engages a real minister, who marries Ethel and Howard. Dick goes west. The couple live happily in a Brooklyn flat for several months when Howard receives a letter from his father, stating that he is planning for his son to marry Beatrice Ford, daughter of his friend, Randolph Ford, a multi-millionaire. He adds that Mr. Ford intends making Howard head of the law department in his firm. Howard realizes he must break off his affair with Ethel. He tells her that he is not married to her, and that he must leave to marry a girl of his own caste. Broken hearted, Ethel informs him she is soon to become a mother. Howard blames the mock marriage on Dick, and leaves. Ethel writes a scathing letter to Dick. Dick hurries east and finds the minister who performed the ceremony. It is the morning of the Sherbrooke-Ford wedding. Ethel goes to the church, and as she starts to denounce her husband during the ceremony, falls in a swoon and is carried into the vestry. Dick and the minister arrive at the church, but the guests are leaving. Ethel comes out of the church alone and meets Dick, who tells her she is really married to Howard. Accompanied by the minister they hurry to the Ford home, where they convince Mr. Ford his son is a bigamist. Mr. Ford, in a rage, declares he will send his son to prison. Horrified at the prospect of a prison term and the attending disgrace, Howard goes into the library where a flash from a pistol shot records his unhappy end. A few months later Ethel and Dick are married.
Review Excerpt
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Cameras never blinked in 1916; they simply devoured light and guilt with equal appetite. Her Reckoning arrives like a tarnished locket pried from a corpse’s clasp, its hinges squealing of gilded hypocrisy and the nickel-plated despair of women who learned that marriage certificates could be mirages. Director Will Louis—more ghost than auteur in the archives—threads each reel with arsenic-laced talcum powder: the softness is cosmetic, the poison systemic.
Howard Sherbrooke, essayed by Leslie A..."
