That Camden Summer

In 1916 Roberta Jewett, 39 & divorced mother of 3 girls, moved back to home town Camden, Maine. A "Public Nurse" (a nurse who travels to patients homes to treat them), she's considered unusual among women living in these times, due to her education, training, and marriage status. She's learned from living for years with a no-good, womanizer, how to fend for herself and the girls. Immediately upon disembarking the train, she meets Gabriel Farley, a widower with a daughter of his own, and a carpenter by trade. He is contracted to fix up her dilapitated house, purchased on her behalf by her conniving, no-good, womanizing brother-in-law. Gabe and Roberta are at once attracted and repelled by each other. Their future dealings run hot or cold. They are polar-opposites. At the same time, Roberta successfully sidesteps her brother-in-law's waundering hands until the day her new Model-T Ford runs out of gas in the countryside and he "happens by" and stops to help her refill. Her brother-in-law no longer takes "no" for an answer and rapes Roberta on the roadside. Roberta knows she can't confide this to her sister Grace or her always condemning mother, so drives to Gabe's for help. She doesn't wish for her girls to find out about their Uncle this way. Gabe is tender and caring and Roberta realizes she loves him. Gabe realizes that Roberta means something more to him than just a first fancy after 7 years of widowhood. Gabe seeks out ______ and beats him to a pulp and almost burns the man with his own cigar, like the man did to Roberta, permanently marking her. The town is outraged at Roberta and Gabe, mistakenly blaming Roberta for playing the men against one another. Roberta wants to move forward but the school board gets wind of this and proposes to take her girls away from her. They say Roberta is an unfit mother because of her poor housekeeping and hours away from home, working. They really think that she is a brazen hussy because she is a divorcee. Gabe offers to marry Roberta but while she loves him, she won't marry him because she wants her next (& last) marriage to be one filled with love and respect. Gabe is a nondemonstrable person, so she has no idea that he does love her. Finally, driven by anger and frustration, Gabe flat out tells Roberta that he loves her and she is going to marry him. They set a wedding date months in advance because Roberta is wary of the marriage bed. Meanwhile, the school board's initiative is voted down after a prominent societal woman sets forth to support Roberta's rape claim, as she herself was raped when 17, by _______. Now the townspeople no longer look past _______'s public philandering and see him for the scum he is. Roberta's mother confesses that her lifetime ill manner towards her daughter is due to the fact that Roberta is the result of an affair the mother had with a traveling train builder. At the wedding, Roberta's mother attends as do many town citizens, but Grace does not show, and continues her cool attitude toward Roberta for the rest of their lives. After some initial resistence, Roberta realizes that Gabe isn't like ______ and her ex-husband ________, she trusts him, so feels comfortable making love with him from then on.