The Lure of Heart's Desire

Summary

Gold flakes swirl through glacial meltwater like flecks of Ethel Wyndham’s disdain when she spurns Jim Carew’s earnest proposal, the ballroom chandeliers suddenly turned to icicles. Carew flees the gilded cages of Fifth Avenue for the white amnesia of the Klondike, where pickaxes sing a dirge for class prejudice. Amid auroras and wolf-howls, he carves fortune from permafrost and wins the trusting heart of Little Snowbird, a Tlingit beauty whose name tastes of cedar smoke. Yet the siren call of unfinished business lures him back to Manhattan’s phosphorescent canyons, where he struts into a champagne-slick supper club to fling nuggets of Alaskan gold at the woman who once measured worth by pedigree. Ethel, poised to surrender, is jerked back by Thomas Martin’s velvet-gloved blackmail; scandal is the coin he hoards. Rejected anew, Carew races north only to find Snowbird’s snow-white form stiff beside a cradle containing their infant daughter—her suicide letter folded like an origami moon. He kneels, vowing to raise the child as epitaph and resurrection, while outside the cabin window the Yukon itself seems to exhale a long, unconsolable sigh.

Synopsis

When socialite Ethel Wyndham turns down his marriage proposal because of his working-class status, Jim Carew leaves civilization and goes prospecting in the Yukon. While striking it rich in Alaska, he begins a romance with Little Snowbird, but before settling down with her, he decides to take one last look at life in the big city, and so he goes to New York. At a restaurant there, he sees Ethel, and immediately tells her of his success and proposes once again. Ethel is tempted to accept him until Thomas Martin, who has involved her in a blackmail operation, threatens to expose her if she marries Jim. Once again broken-hearted, Jim returns to Little Snowbird, only to find that, believing that he would never return, she committed suicide. Before dying, however, she gave birth to their daughter, to whom Jim devotes the rest of his life.