Mr. Edwards falls in love

Mr. Edwards runs his circuit of small-town whorehouses out of Boston like an accountant, keeping a respectable wife, two sons booked into Groton, and an unvarying rule never to believe a word his girls say. Rebuilding three units after a train wreck and a revival meeting have cost him his stock, he interviews a girl calling herself Catherine Amesbury, and against every instinct falls in love with her. He gives her a brick house and buys her luxuries; she keeps him permanently off balance, mortgages the house, steals from his pockets and sells the jewellery. Forced to drink champagne one evening, she turns on him — "you fat slug" — and grinds a broken glass into his cheek. A detective's clipping about a small-town fire tells him the rest. He takes her out to a place between a stone wall and some cedars, throws away her purse with its knife, and beats her with a quirt, then his fists, then a stone. She crawls to a farmhouse gate at dawn.

Cathy's method is shown working on a professional who should be immune, which is the point of choosing a whoremaster as her first adult victim: love is what makes him stupid. The champagne is her one miscalculation, and the newspaper clipping is his. Both of them discover something they did not know was in them.