Summary
A minister’s daughter, draped in calico dreams, hitchhikes on hope from a one-horse hamlet to a Gothic-brick college where jazz-age debutantes glide like swans in satin. Her trunk is a reliquary of homemade frocks; her accent, a rusted hinge. The quad becomes a panopticon of whispers—every giggle a scalpel. Abandoned on Thanksgiving weekend, she forges a love letter from gridiron god ‘Bullet’ Dick Ames, mails it to herself, then ‘drops’ the forgery where the queen bee will find it. The prank metastasizes: Daisy Arnold, high priestess of the Beauty Squad, summons the real Dick and his sister for the holidays, expecting public disgrace. Instead, the golden halfback, amused and touched, swaggers into the role of ardent fiancé, turning the hoax into a torch song. What begins as charity morphs into vertiginous romance: midnight skating on a frozen pond, a trembling waltz under paper lanterns, a confession whispered through a fraternity-house window. Yet the heroine, allergic to charity, refuses the diamond, convinced the proposal is pity plated as passion. Only when the sister engineers a moonlit reckoning on a train platform—steam, whistle, tears—does the girl trust that love can be both miracle and meritocracy.
Synopsis
Doris Willard, the daughter of a village minister, achieves the realization of her great dream, a year at college. Doris, although a sweet and pretty girl, is greatly handicapped by her clothes. On her arrival at college she is eyed by the other girls with concealed amusement and curiosity and soon realizes that she "doesn't belong." The girls snub her at every opportunity and she is desperately lonesome and longs for companionship. The Saturday before Thanksgiving when everyone else has gone to the big Princeton-Yale game, Doris sits alone in her room. She picks up the newspaper and sees in it a picture that greatly appeals to her. It is a newspaper cut of "Bullet" Dick Ames, the universal choice for the '"All-American Eleven." She conceives a desperate plan. She thinks nobody at her college knows Dick and decides she will make the girls think he is in love with her. She writes a note to herself to which she signs Dick's name. The note is a proposal of marriage. This she drops on the porch of the girls' hall and it is picked up by one of the girls who reads it to the bunch. Daisy Arnold, the undisputed ruler of the "Beauty Squad," will not believe that Dick knows Doris, and writes to his sister, Eleanor, asking both her and Dick down for the holidays. In her letter she tells Eleanor about Doris claiming Dick has asked her to marry him. Dick sees the letter and he and his sister accept the invitation. When Dick sees Doris, he decides to help her out in her deception. Doris is panic-stricken on the night of the reception given in Eleanor's and Dick's honor, but when she is introduced to Dick he says, "Why sure, we are old friends," and Daisy and her friends are much disappointed, their plan for humiliating Doris having fallen through. After meeting Dick, Doris is unwilling to carry out the deception, but he insists, and before his visit is over they are much in love with each other. Doris, however, refuses to marry Dick, thinking he has asked her out of pity, but through Eleanor's efforts he manages to make her understand that he really loves her.
Review Excerpt
"The projector hums like a trapped bee, and suddenly 1915 splashes across my retinas in silver nitrate bloom: The Mating, a title that sounds like a biology reel but secretes a fable of social taxidermy. I first encountered this print in a Paris archive, shrink-wrapped in vinegar syndrome; tonight I revisit it on 35 mm, the way its intended audience once did—palms sticky with orange soda, hearts braced for cataclysm.
Doris Willard arrives on campus wearing a dress that looks sewn from church pew..."
