Summary
A belching locomotive slices through the pre-war Virginia dusk, its headlamp washing the Cameron plantation in molten gold; within this trembling halo, Paul Whitney—heir to iron rails and Northern capital—offers Jane Cameron a Faustian bargain: a ribbon of steel across her ancestral loam in exchange for modernity’s kiss. Instead, the landowner’s daughter gifts him a deeper covenant: her own ungovernable heart. Their union, sealed beneath catawba blossoms and the watchful gaze of enslaved oaks, ferries Jane from red-clay furrows to marble corridors where every chandelier teems with the spectral etiquette of Paul’s first wife, the sainted Evelyn, whose portrait breathes frost into every room. While Paul chases trout in the Adirondacks, Jane—now chatelaine of a mausoleum masquerading as a mansion—learns from Edmond Knapp, Paul’s best friend and Evelyn’s former lover, that the marble saint was flesh, betrayal, and sighs behind velvet drapes. Edmond, drunk on his own confession, tries to seduce Jane as if adultery were an heirloom to bequeath; she repulses him with the fury of a displaced goddess, then chooses silence over shattering her husband’s plaster idol. Paul returns, weather-burnished and contrite, to find Jane poised between truth and mercy; he swears, amid the echoing hush of ancestral clocks, that the living woman before him eclipses any marble memory. The locomotive that once threatened her land now whistles in harmonic concord with her pulse: a promise that the past may rust, but the track ahead gleams, unsparing and possible.
Synopsis
A railroad owner's son, Paul Whitney, visits the Virginia plantation of Jane Cameron hoping to persuade her to grant the railroad a right-of-way through her land. The two fall in love and marry, but after Jane moves into Paul's home in the North, she discovers that he and his family still idolize his deceased first wife. While Paul is away on a fishing trip, Jane learns from his friend, Edmond Knapp, who is infatuated with her, that he and Paul's first wife had carried on an affair. Jane forcefully rejects Edmond's advances and on her way home, decides not to disclose to Paul his late wife's infidelity. Paul returns home and tells Jane that she is the most important woman in his life.
