Play 9 Acts
New York 1928
After World War One, Nina Leeds bitterly resents her father, Professor Henry Leeds, for not allowing her to marry her sportsman, and war-hero fiancé Gordon Shaw. She becomes a nurse in a hospital for crippled soldiers and covers her sorrow by excessive promiscuity with the patients, but later marries ineffectual Sam Evans hoping for a stable marriage and children.
However, her joy of becoming pregnant is short-lived for her mother-in-law tells her of insanity in the family and insists she has an abortion. Dr Edmund Darrell becomes her lover and she has his child, Gordon, which she convinces Evans is his. Although happy as a mother, Nina still longs for her old lover, who is in Europe, but when he returns she will not break up her happy home for him.
As the young Gordon grows up, he comes to resent the attention his mother gets from Darrell, while she is growing to hate Evans, now a successful businessman. Evans dies and Gordon leaves to get married. Nina refuses to marry Darrell and settles for an old friend of her father, Charles Marsden who has admired her from afar for years.
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