Summary
Doris Dumond—convent-bred, moonstruck—returns to a Manhattan tenement where her mother’s appetite for sparkle has mortgaged tomorrow: one glimmering installment on a rope of diamonds, the balance overdue, the wolf-dealer Hammond already sniffing at the door. Night swallows the girl; her body rises from the sheets like a marionette whose strings are pulled by unpaid guilt. She glides through gas-lit corridors, a somnambulant angel, and alights on the predator’s threshold. Hammond, half-credulous, half-aroused, locks the somber room; dawn finds mother, lover, house-dick hammering the panels, each face a tribunal. Words tangle; reputations plummet. Yet the city itself intervenes: a cooing child teeters on a cornice, pigeons scattering like torn confetti. Doris, still asleep, scales the façade, palms the void, pulls the infant back into breath. In that instant the ledger of blame is razored; Phillip presses pearls of apology into her palm, buys the sullied jewels, slips a circlet of gold onto the finger that once clutched only moonlight.
Synopsis
Doris Dumond is called home from a convent school by her mother, who has purchased some diamonds and has sold them although she has paid only one installment of the price. Hammond, the dealer's agent, threatens to have her arrested unless she pays the debt within 24 hours. Doris, who is a somnambulist, enters Hammond's room at night while asleep, and purposely misconstruing her visit, he keeps her there. The house detective, her mother, and her sweetheart, Phillip, gather in the room; and with the exception of Mrs. Dumond, no one believes her story. That night, she again walks in her sleep in response to the cry of a baby who has strayed onto a window ledge in pursuit of pigeons, and she saves the child. With her innocence thus established, Phillip begs her forgiveness, pays for her mother's jewels, and is married to Doris.
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