The Lesson

Helen Drayton, stifled by the syrupy stillness of a one-horse town, lashes out against the suffocating assumption that she will dutifully wed her lifelong escort Chet Vernon. When a Manhattan architect, John Galvin, glides in like a skyscraper shadow, she mistakes his asphalt arrogance for cosmopolitan oxygen and elopes to New York. The city, a glittering maw, devours her illusions street by street: cramped boarding-house rooms, John’s patronizing neglect, the humiliation of being paraded as a provincial ornament. After a miscarriage and a bruising encounter with John’s society mistress, Helen crawls back to the very porch she once spurned, discovering that the patient solidity she fled was the only shelter that ever asked nothing in return.