Understanding Adora

Understanding Adora by Eleanor M. Ingram continues the author's romantic fiction. The novella opens in contemporary New York City, where wealthy Miss Anne Van Huyden, riding in her chauffeured limousine, impulsively invites a young man shoveling snow off Fifth Avenue into her car. Their encounter becomes a conversation about impulse and romance, during which Miss Van Huyden recounts a family story to him.

The embedded narrative concerns her great-great-grandmother, seventeen-year-old Adora Hamilton, during the Franco-Prussian War in France. While watching troops parade past her window in 1870, Adora witnesses a wounded French prisoner of war. Despite her Prussian sympathies and strict upbringing, she impulsively pulls the prisoner into her room through the window, hides him behind lace curtains as guards search, and frees his bound wrists. As her mother approaches, the prisoner hides in Adora's bed while her maid appears at the door—creating immediate tension and danger.