Infatuation

The narrative follows Phyllis Ladd from childhood bereavement into adolescence, showing how her mother's death draws her into an intense, dependent intimacy with her father, a railroad president, and shapes her early maturity. Set against a socially stratified city of interconnected elites and crowded working quarters, the story traces her emotional education: absorbing adult concerns, learning to see competing perspectives through her father's influence, and encountering romantic attraction whose awkwardness exposes tensions between personal desire, family expectations, and the social world that surrounds them.