Summary
Clara Weston’s eastward odyssey toward professional respectability is violently truncated within the claustrophobic, booze-soaked confines of a frontier outpost. While a cacophonous brawl erupts in the saloon below, the sanctity of her chamber is breached by Rex Fenton, a drunken surveyor whose predatory arrival is fueled by a logistical error—he mistakes Clara’s room for that of a local courtesan. The ensuing violation leaves Clara adrift in a sea of trauma, eventually manifesting as a pregnancy she must navigate alone in the urban sprawl of the East. In a stroke of cosmic, almost cruel irony, she secures a secretarial position under Fenton himself. Now clean-shaven and stripped of his rugged frontier exterior, Fenton is unrecognizable to his victim. Their subsequent romance and marriage, predicated on a foundation of mutual ignorance, leads to Fenton unknowingly adopting his own biological child. The fragile domesticity shatters when Fenton unearths Clara’s 'compromised' history, projecting a hypocritical moral outrage that nearly destroys their union. The resolution hinges on a literal and figurative mark: a scar on Fenton’s wrist, a remnant of Clara’s desperate resistance, which serves as the ultimate catalyst for his self-recognition and eventual, desperate plea for absolution.
Synopsis
Clara Weston, on her way back East to accept a secretarial position, is delayed along the road and forced to spend the evening at a frontier hotel and dance hall. During the night, while a fight is in progress in the saloon downstairs, Clara is raped by a drunken surveyor who enters her room with the belief that it is the apartment of a dance hall girl with whom he had arranged a clandestine rendezvous. The next morning, Clara resumes her trip to the city where she learns that she is pregnant. By coincidence, she becomes secretary to Rex Fenton, her assailant, but does not recognize him because he has shaved his beard. They fall in love and are married, and Fenton unknowingly adopts his own child. Later, Fenton discovers Clara's past and renounces her for not being truthful with him. However, when a scar on his wrist inflicted by his victim betrays that Fenton was Clara's attacker, he begs her forgiveness, which Clara grants for the sake of their child.
