Summary
A tremor of ink on a ledger page, Dorothy Hallowell’s life is first glimpsed through the staccato clatter of a Wall Street stenotype—each keystroke a miniature explosion against the marble hush of partner corridors. She transcribes fortunes, yet remains illiterate to the tremulous subtext that Frederick Norman, junior partner and manacled fiancé, inscribes between every margin: a libretto of longing written in the currency of laboratories, endowments, and the brittle etiquette of 1910s Manhattan. When Dorothy’s father—an eccentric chemist whose beakers glow like secular tabernacles—receives an anonymous grant, the petri dish of obligation begins to bloom bacteria of debt. Dorothy, decoding the circuitry of philanthropy as manipulation, rebuffs the transaction of affection; the engagement ring clangs to the parquet like a fallen coronet, its diamond scattering moral spectrum across the floor. Banished by scandal’s whisper, she retreats to a whistle-stop town whose sidewalks remember her childhood hopscotch, only to discover that memory has been redacted by gossip’s indelible ink. Forced back into the city’s electric labyrinth, she becomes the grain of dust in the gears of patriarchy—an irritant that polishes the machine while threatening to seize it. What follows is a chiaroscuro of boarding-house corridors, courtroom anterooms, and rain-slick rooftops where silhouettes negotiate the price of autonomy under the watchful eyes of a society that auctions womanhood by the ounce.
Synopsis
Stenographer Dorothy Hallowell works for a Wall Street law firm, and isn't aware that Frederick Norman, a junior partner in the firm, is madly in love with her, even though he is engaged to be married. To get closer to her, he finances her father's laboratory, but when Dorothy realizes what he's up to, she turns him down. His fiancee finds out and breaks their engagement. Dorothy moves back to her small town, but soon runs into trouble when stories of her "unseemly behavior" in New York result in her having to leave town and return to New York, where she manages to get into even more trouble. Complications ensue.
