Summary
A lambent corona of footlights halos the silhouette of a prairie ingenue who steps off the milk-train into Manhattan’s electric dusk, her valise stuffed with gingham dreams and a hummingbird heartbeat. Overnight, the city’s neon vines braid themselves around her throat; she blossoms into a phosphorescent marquee name, each letter a paper lantern floating above Times Square. Yet rumor—fork-tongued, mercury-quick—whispers that the glow is purchased by silk sheets and a benefactor’s platinum signature. Disgust, sharp as a broken compact mirror, propels her from the proscenium into the dusty arteries of a barn-storming rep company, where kerosene lamps hiss and the scent of sawdust is a sacrament. There, beneath the guise of a name not her own, she pirouettes through one-night stands until a sun-creased agrarian—calloused hands, eyes like rain on wheat—watches her counterfeit Juliet and falls, unwitting, for the woman inside the role. Betrothal rings are spoken over in a clapboard church whose bell still bears Civil War scars. But the velvet spider back in Gotham, purse-lipped and proprietorial, rattles his checkbook like a saber; he dispatches lackeys, scandal, and ultimately his own disavowed longing to reel his luminous asset back to the gilded cage. What follows is not mere chase but chiaroscuro: footlights versus starlight, ledger love versus loam-scented devotion, the city’s roar against the hush of loam.
Synopsis
A pretty young girl from the country arrives in New York, hoping to become a Broadway star. She achieves that goal, but when she hears untrue stories that she became a star because she's the mistress of her show's wealthy backer, she leaves the show and joins a traveling stock company. Page Brookins, a farmer who doesn't know who she really is, sees one of her shows, meets her, they fall in love and plan to be married. However, her wealthy backer in New York hears about it and sets out to break up the engagement and bring her back to New York.
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