Summary
A dew-kissed ingénue from the hinterlands, Jeanne Sterling, perches on a Central Park bench at gloaming, her gingham naïveté a lantern amid Manhattan’s sooty chiaroscuro. Fortuitously, Forrest Chenoweth—velvet-clad, champagne-addled, heir to a coal-and-rail fortune—lurches into her orbit, still clutching the marriage license he had blithely filed with Helen Dorr, a platinum-haired adventuress whose pupils glitter like mercury whenever banknotes flutter. In the hush between gas-lamp flickers, Forrest is spellbound by Jeanne’s lambent sincerity; within minutes he has cajoled a tipsy alderman—his poker crony—to swap Helen’s name for Jeanne’s on the parchment, sealing a union that exists only because ink is cheaper than conscience. Midnight tolls, champagne turns to ether, and the groom, half-phantom, half-marionette, tumbles down a mahogany staircase, neck snapped on a finial’s cruel curve. Morning headlines scream of ‘the Park-Avenue Corpse Bride,’ branding Jeanne a gold-digging Jezebel though she has not yet shed her country calico. Back home, her steadfast beau Robert Pitcairn—engineer of bridges and believer in banns—receives her confession like a gut-punch of ice. Meanwhile Helen, draped in sables of hubris, swans into the Chenoweth solicitors’ office claiming widowhood, waving the original license like a privateer’s flag. The alderman, threatened with exposure by his own black-sheep son (Helen’s co-conspirator), insists the marriage ledger is gospel and Jeanne a mere ‘footnote in fountain-pen.’ Reputations combust, stock prices shudder, and the city’s tabloids gorge. Yet conscience is a trick candle: under the vaulted nave of St. Anselm’s, the alderman’s trembling hand amends the record, restoring Jeanne’s name and toppling Helen’s cardboard empire in a single stroke of ink that smells of fear and absolution.
Synopsis
While waiting on a New York park bench for the return of her friends, country girl Jeanne Sterling meets Forrest Chenoweth, a rich young wastrel who, while drunk, registered for a marriage license with fortune-hunting Helen Dorr. Enchanted with Jeanne's innocence, Forrest proposes to Jeanne, and they are married by an alderman friend of Forrest's with the license that Forrest had taken out with Helen. That night Forrest drinks too much, falls in his room and kills himself. The scandal appears in the papers, forcing Jeanne to confess the marriage to her sweetheart Robert Pitcairn. However, Helen, in an attempt to acquire the Chenoweth fortune, claims to be Forrest's widow, thus disgracing Jeanne. The alderman, induced by his son, who is in league with Helen, refuses to recognize Jeanne, but finally relents, clearing the girl's besmirched reputation.
