Jane Cable

This may be McCutcheon's worst book. It's just bad. The writing is dull, the characters are insipid and two-dimensional (except for the ugly and peculiar legal clerk Elias Droom, who is interesting but unfathomable) and the plot hinges on an issue I can't believe would have been significant even in its period. As a desperate measure to save her marriage, a woman adopts a baby from a foundlings' home and sends for her estranged husband, then a railroad engineer, telling him the child is theirs. The tactic works, but 20 years later, when the parents have become wealthy members of Chicago society, the shady lawyer who arranged the secret adoption blackmails the mother, even though his own son, Graydon, who knows nothing of his father's chicanery, and Jane Cable, the adopted daughter, are in love and engaged to marry. Ultimately, the truth comes out, yet though shocked and angry, the adoptive dad stands by both wife and daughter and claims publicly to have been in on the adoption all along. However, Jane now refuses to marry Graydon — not because he's the son of an unscrupulous blackmailer, but because she, though still rich, beautiful and the beloved daughter of a self-made man, has been revealed as an adopted waif without a pedigree. Even in the heyday of the Potter Palmers, was Chicago ever as hoity toity as all that? I doubt even the English ton went so far.