Summary
A marble-hearted barrister, Horace Kennedy, once the sun around which his wife Mary’s universe spun, now glances past her as though she were a smudge on the family portrait. While he thunders in court against a shifty attorney, his own domestic covenant quietly frays; Mary’s wrists, once quick with affectionate gestures, soon swell beneath a bandage that becomes the film’s pale flag of surrender. Into this chill matrimony slips Margaret Warner, ink-stained and rent-poor, hired to transcribe Horace’s righteous articles—twelve sermons on probity that he dictates while inching toward hypocrisy. The typewriter becomes confessional booth: each clack of keys a muffled heartbeat, every ribbon of ink a vein opening. When a midnight streetcar accident hurls the two collaborators into each other’s arms, the camera lingers on Margaret’s fainted form, half-saint, half-temptress, cradled by a man who has forgotten the contours of his own vows. Doyle, the disbarred shark, circles the margins selling fool’s-gold shares to immigrant washers, a living reminder that rot in high places drips downward. Episode One ends with the gas-lamps flickering like uncertain consciences, and with Mary—wrist splinted, pride splintered—watching from a lamplit window as her husband carries another woman through the rain.
Synopsis
Episode 1: "The Woman Alone" Horace Kennedy, a successful lawyer, is drifting from his attentive and loyal wife, Mary, for no apparent reason, save that she is fading and he is losing interest in her. On the charge made by Margaret Warner, a struggling magazine writer, Kennedy disbars Attorney Doyle, contending that as a man must protect the honor of his wife and home, so must we guard our courts from prowling jackals. Because of his masterly handling of the disbarment case, a magazine requests Kennedy to write twelve articles dealing with the subject. Mary, his wife, persuades him against his wishes, to write these articles, suggesting that she will take his dictation on the typewriter. She proves an inefficient helper and the first night on which they work she falls and sprains her wrist, making it necessary for Kennedy to look elsewhere for assistance. Margaret, living in a cheap boarding-house is poor, as her short story manuscripts are returned day after day by the magazines. Desiring to help her Kennedy engages her for the work. Doyle, forced out of his profession, continues his work in the field of crooked-stock jobbing, taking the hard-earned savings of the poor for bogus mining stock. The last night of their joint work, Kennedy accompanies Margaret home, but on their way they are caught in an accident. Kennedy escapes injury, but Margaret faints. Calling to her to speak to him, Kennedy, with Margaret in his arms, rushes to a physician. Is the girl he is beginning to love to be thus taken from him?
