Summary
Ellen Llewellyn exists in the precarious liminality between the footlights of a Boston stage and the grim reality of a chorus girl’s subsistence. Her life is a syncopated rhythm of Sunday dinners with her mother and the frantic dash to the theater, where the threat of dismissal looms like a guillotine. Spared from the stage manager’s ire by Andy Owens—a devoted orchestra leader whose baton orchestrates both the pit and his unrequited affection—Ellen remains steadfastly resistant to his domestic overtures, fearing the gravitational pull of a marginal, hand-to-mouth existence. The narrative pivot occurs when she encounters Tony Winterslip, an aristocratic scion whose wealth is matched only by his lack of personal agency. Though she rejects his proposal, viewing his idle fortune as a gilded cage, a sudden bout of pneumonia forces her into the very opulence she distrusted. Convalescing within the Winterslip mausoleum of high society, Ellen finds the silence of wealth more deafening than the cacophony of the stage. It is Tony’s own grandmother, a woman of sharp intuition, who recognizes that Ellen’s soul is forged in the fire of the theater rather than the ice of the aristocracy, eventually engineering a reunion with Andy—now a man of burgeoning Broadway success—as the curtain falls on Ellen’s brief flirtation with the leisure class.
Synopsis
After visiting her mother for Sunday dinner, Ellen Llewellyn, a chorus girl, is late for the rehearsal of a Boston musical, but she is spared the wrath of the stage manager when the orchestra leader, Andy Owens, diverts his attention until she is in place. Andy has often proposed to Ellen but is always refused, for she feels that marriage to him would mean an uncertain and marginal existence. Ellen meets aristocratic, wealthy Tony Winterslip, who soon proposes to her; she turns him down also, knowing him to be unambitious and dependent upon his name and fortune. When Ellen catches pneumonia, Tony provides her with a nurse and then persuades her to convalesce at the family mansion. Ellen is bored by the dull routine of life in the Winterslip home, and Tony's grandmother, realizing that Ellen would never be happy with Tony, reunites her with Andy. They are now married, on the promise of a rewarding career for Andy, who has just sold a musical to Broadway.
