Summary
A porcelain-marble matron, Dora West, drifts through the hushed antechambers of a physician’s mansion like smoke from an unlit candle; her smile, once bright as surgical steel, dulls beneath the weight of a marriage that has ossified into diagnosis without remedy. She discovers oxygen in the gaze of Hilton, her husband’s orphaned protégé, a boy-man whose eyes carry the glint of roulette wheels yet to spin. Their clandestine electricity crackles against mahogany wainscots until the only escape she can envisage is death by water: she leaves her silk-slippered footprints on a riverbank, pockets weighted with stones of gossip, and vanishes into myth. Reborn in the fugitive dusk of train compartments and cheap hotel wallpapers, she learns that passion, when prolonged, becomes an anesthetic; Hilton’s kisses turn to IOUs scribbled on cigarette papers. He courts Lilla Ashley, heiress to a fortune stitched from scalpels and ether, while Dora, now a ghost haunting her own life, peers through conservatory glass at the infant daughter she surrendered to respectability. The Ashley manor, all alabaster colonnades and hothouse orchids, becomes the amphitheater where masks liquefy: husband confronts wife, lover confronts creditors, child confronts the void of a mother once presumed drowned. In the chandelier’s drip of candlefat, vows are unmade, cards are shown, and the final tableau sees Dora reclaimed—not as spouse, but as specimen—her pulse once again under her husband’s professional thumb, though the scar tissue of autonomy glows faintly beneath the re-fastened wedding band.
Synopsis
Dora West, the wife of a doctor, falls in love with Hilton, her husband's ward. Allowing it to be thought that she has drowned, Dora elopes with Hilton, who, quickly tiring of her and swamped with gambling debts, becomes secretly engaged to Lilla Ashley, the daughter of a rich and famous specialist. Dr. West, a colleague of Lilla's father, pays a visit to the Ashley house, prompting Dora to sneak into the house to see her little daughter. The resulting confrontations expose Hilton's double game, and Dr. West takes Dora back.
Review Excerpt
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The first time we see Dora West, she is framed within a doorway like a cameo brooch: ivory skin, jet choker, the corridor behind her yawning like a throat swallowing light. Pearl Shepard plays her with the brittle regality of a woman who already suspects the chandelier is about to fall. In 1923 audiences had grown accustomed to love-conflagrations that ended in baptismal redemption or death by convenient tuberculosis. Why Leave Your Husband? offers neither salve nor saintliness; instead it spi..."
