The Small Town Girl

Summary

A sun-bleached haystack of innocence—June, all calico and naïveté—descends into the soot-choked maw of First Avenue, where gaslight ghosts lick the brickwork and every hallway exhales the sour breath of tenement despair. She arrives clutching not a carpet-bag but the last gasp of pastoral purity, tasked with tending Aunt’s waif Jane, a child who still believes the world hums lullabies. Yet the city has already drafted its counter-move: Frank, her once-sweet barn-dance beau, now lacquered in metropolitan ambition, his eyes flickering like nickelodeon reels. Their reunion is no pastoral idyll but a collision of timelines—pastoral past vs. asphalt future—staged in a corridor where plaster flakes snow onto cracked linoleum. Above them, a kleptocratic coterie—equal parts Fagin and Grand Guignol—has secreted a blood-warm ruby inside the frayed satin of Mame’s slipper, a shoe as treacherous as Clytemnestra’s net. Jane, tiny Pandora, discovers the Trojan heel, rips it open, and out rolls not hope but a carbuncle that refracts every tenement bulb into infernal red. Frank, suddenly the moral fulcrum, sprints for the bulls while the gang—synapses sparking like tattered wiring—descends on June in a mise-en-abîme of chiaroscuro menace. Doors slam like coffin lids; shadows dagger across peeling wallpaper; the child’s hopscotch chalk becomes a cartography of doom. The precinct arrives in a cacophony of nightsticks and flash-powder, cuffs clacking like metronomes on Judgment Day. Order restored, the couple flee the city’s gravitational rot, bound for a countryside that may no longer recognize them—two refugees carrying a marriage license instead of scars.

Synopsis

June, a country girl, comes to New York to take care of her aunt's little girl Jane. In a squalid First Avenue tenement, she meets Frank, her old sweetheart from back home who had come to the city to make good. In the same house lives a band of thieves who steal a jewel and hide it in a slipper belonging to Mame, one of the members of the gang. One day Jane finds the shoe and begins to play with it. When she accidentally tears off the heel, the gem falls to the floor. Frank, recognizing it as the stolen jewel, rushes off to get the police. Meanwhile, the crooks discover the loss of the slipper and Mame learns that June has it. They all converge upon June just as the police arrive. The crooks are arrested, and June and Frank return home for their honeymoon.