Margie Bayer

Goodnight Eleanor Margie Bayer

Seattle, Washington 1909. While the city boasts of a 500 room brothel which caters to men's desires, holding hands is an entitled privilege of courtship. Beneath harnesses of whale bone corsets and suspensory belts strapped across loins, a new generation wishes to be free from the remains of the Victorian era. Impassioned undercurrents between men and women are unraveling and intensifying. While strait-laced notions are being taught on proper conduct while in the presence of real live men, and that beauty serves only to find husbands, the suffrage movement worries most men as it sweeps across the nation and Washington state. After having carried the fainted Eleanor across the Alaska-Pacific-Yukon Exposition grounds, Nate Miller finds her employed at his father's mansion on Millionaire Row. After a 14-year absence, it would kill Nate to stay under his father's roof. It would kill him more if he could never see Eleanor again. Financial family difficulties force Eleanor to leave her insurance company job for the deplorable position as "domestic" for the despised and hated Miller's who hold the mortgage on her family's house. It does not take Eleanor long to realize that Nate intends to wake and stimulate feelings, instincts and desires, that if roused, are believed to become diseased. In the course of delicate love, Nate finds himself competing for it with another man--Eleanor's older brother Richard, who is stricken with tuberculosis.