Summary
Railway dust still clinging to her hem, orphan Ruth Sheldon steps off the train clutching a pulp magazine’s promise that ‘a love charm can bend destiny’—an incantation she will soon test in a household where scrub-brushes outnumber affections. Aunt Julia’s clapboard mansion, part mausoleum and part sweatshop, swallows the girl whole: before dusk she is its scullery, seam-stress, and scapegoat, her only inheritance the hiss of cast-iron skillets. Enter Thomas Morgan—lanky banker, starched collar glinting like a moral compass—whose gaze slides past cousin Hattie’s practiced simper and lands on the newcomer’s flour-dusted hands, reading them like balance sheets of the heart. Jealousy, that old puppeteer, jerks Hattie into declarations of possession; Ruth, self-sacrificing to the marrow, decides to unshine herself, refashioning her sincerity into the sequined mask of a jazz-age vamp—cigarette holder, slang like tossed coins, laugh brittle enough to cut crystal. The ruse thickens when Harry, Thomas’s sardonic older brother, sniffs out the masquerade and, with a smirk that could unscrew lightbulbs, spills the secret. Fortune’s roulette wheel spins: an unexpected inheritance turns Harry into matrimonial bait, Hattie lunges for the richer prize, and the counterfeit vampire dissolves at dawn, leaving the old-fashioned girl and the steadfast banker alone on a porch where love needs no charm but the truth.
Synopsis
Orphaned Ruth Sheldon reads an article on "Love Charms" on her way to live in the home of her Aunt Julia and Cousin Hattie Nast. Upon her arrival, Ruth is put to work as housekeeper, cook, and seamstress. When Thomas Morgan, a young banker, is invited to dinner, he focuses his attention on Ruth, prompting the envious Hattie to claim him as her own. To oblige her cousin, Ruth attempts to discourage Thomas by behaving like a frivolous society "vampire," rather than the old-fashioned girl he believes her to be. However, Thomas's brother, Harry, reveals her true intentions. Before long, Harry comes into money and Hattie chooses him over his brother, leaving Ruth free to marry Thomas.
