Plot
Elsie Crofton, age eighteen, is a former chorus girl. She has given up the stage to elope with wealthy, spoiled, but good-hearted Harry Hammond, the son of a government contractor. Harry's parents, Phillip and Eleanor, his sister Margery and her fiancé Fred Blakely consider Elsie dangerous to their social position and oppose the marriage. They arrange for Harry to go to a family construction site, to interrupt the honeymoon, and send Elsie to stay at their summer home, where their family friends Alfie and Anne Westford are also staying.
The family plans to destroy the marriage by placing Elsie in a compromising position with the willing and eager Fred. Anne also reveals her prejudices against Elsie. Elsie soon grasps the situation and decides to take action. She flirts with all the men, which dismays her visiting husband, but she gains the sympathies of Phillip, Fred and Alfie. Eleanor, Margery and Anne are furious, but Elsie reveals their scheme, and everybody reconciles.
Read more about this topic: A Dangerous Maid
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)