The bestselling story behind Ross Hunter’s classic melodrama starring Susan Hayward and John Gavin.     When “fly girl” and gorgeous socialite Ray Schmidt first meets Walter Saxel in Cincinnati, their attraction is instant and everlasting. As their bond deepens, Ray finds herself envisioning a future with Walter, until one fateful day when the settling of her family affairs interferes with their plans to meet, and his relationship with another woman forms. Though years pass and Ray manages to carve out a life for herself in New York City, Walter remains in her memory, and a chance run-in with him leads them both to fall into their former ways. What unfolds is the fascinating tale of what life was for selfless, devoted Ray, a prisoner to her love for the one man who would never fully love her back.   Originally published in 1931, this bestselling classic novel about the heartbreak of living along the “back streets” of a man’s life was adapted into film three times. With a new foreword by Cari Beauchamp. Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based. Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) was an American novelist. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1909. Hurst was a member of the Lucy Stone League, the Urban League, and was appointed to the National Advisory Committee to the Works Progress Administration in 1940. She was also a delegate to the World Health Organization in 1952. She published over twenty novels and story collections in her lifetime. 1 One evening in one of those Over-­the-­Rhine cafés which were plentiful along Vine Street of the Cincinnati of the nineties, a traveling salesman leaned across his stein of Moerlein’s Extra Light and openly accused Ray Schmidt of being innocent. “I know! You’re one of those cheating girls who act fly but aren’t. You’ll lead a man on, but you won’t go all the way.” At the implication and all that went with it, Ray’s hand flew to her tippet, color ran beneath her tan pallor, and as usual when under stress, she rolled her eyes and became flippant. “Try me,” was what she said, with little sense of the outrageousness of such a remark. “That’s exactly what I have been trying to do all evening,” said the traveling salesman who, having exhibited what was for him an unprecedented astuteness in his summary of Ray Schmidt, now leaned to pinch her knee softly underneath the table. Ray was forever being pinched underneath tables. As far back as she could remember, as a child and then as a girl growing up on Baymiller Street, boys had been fond of pinching and pulling her toward them for kisses. “Spooning” was not unpleasant, particularly in the evening, when somehow the boys’ faces receded out of a pimply reality into the velvet tunnels of Cincinnati’s low kind of darkness. With the boys whose faces persisted in jutting lumpily, even out of cover of nighttime, Ray simply had not the heart to follow the slightly disgusted impulse to push them away. One “spooned” to be kind. It gave you the reputation of being “fly,” no doubt of that, particularly if, like Ray, you were endowed with that subtle womanish dimension known as “style.” Ray had that. When she even so much as walked past the Stag Hotel, skirts held up off the sidewalk with that ineffable turn of wrist which again denoted “style,” there was that in her demeanor which caused each male head and eye to turn. Sometimes they made kissing sounds with their lips, past which she sailed with her head high. But the fact was that more usually than not Ray had attired herself, at length and with great detail, for this rapid sail past the Stag Hotel. The turning of the heads set agog within her a sense of excitement. It made life seem to quicken, as she felt the eyes burn along her well-­corseted back. It was as if she could feel, with the very taper of her torso into a waistline that two ordinary hands could come within an inch of spanning, the rhythm of being well-­proportioned. Nor was she above straining her ears from beneath their pompadour for the bits of applause that were sometimes carried along to her. “Hot baby!” “You’d look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two!” “Sweet Marie, come to me!” “She’s a daisy!” Ray’s longish eyelids would properly drop like two slow fans, and she would remark, if her stepsister Freda happened to be along, “See anything green?” But deep within her would begin to run the stirring saps of her body. The contour of her breasts, flung high by corsets, felt beautiful, and so did the movement of her flaring hips and the strength in the calves of her legs as, beneath two petticoats and a Spanish-­flounced skirt, they hurried her along in their strong black cotton stockings. Privately her own as were these sensations that lay warmly in her body, the bold fact was that the eyes of the men seeme