The Wheel of Love by Lillian Barker

The Wheel of Love by Lillian Barker This 1933 romantic novel follows Marcia Reynolds, a twenty-two-year-old impoverished woman living at a women's club for the unemployed. After spending her last dime on a fortune-teller's card that prophesies romantic entanglement and danger, Marcia is struck by a luxury automobile on Fourteenth Street in New York. She awakens in the car of her dashing, wealthy rescuer—a dark-eyed man who carries her to the hospital and tenderly waits for news of her condition. Doctor Fuller finds her injuries minor, though he recommends a week's hospitalization. The narrative emphasizes Marcia's poverty and vulnerability alongside her beauty and courage, while establishing the anonymous gentleman as an attentive, sympathetic figure whose appearance seemingly fulfills the fortune's prediction of romance to come.