Love it.
Absolutely wonderful. Great diction. Dialogue is incredible. Despite characters being introduced at a rapid rate, the character traits are portrayed incredibly well and their personalities are memorable. I cannot stress enough how skillful your dialogue is written; however, your dialogue to exposition ratio is very high. Consider breaking up dialogue with descriptions of the setting, characters, or character actions. If you describe the scenery with the same incredible word choice you have used throughout, it would be a stone-throw away from a masterpiece.
I know this is your first work, so the following critiques are entirely intended to be constructive:
There is some punctuation errors (they do improve in later chapters though) when it comes to separating dependent and independent clauses. This leads to either run-on sentences, in some cases, or sentences without sufficient commas. This is easily fixed by reading over your chapters, sentence by sentence, and counting the amount of dependent/independent clauses found in each. This also allows you to find small spelling, spacing, and word use errors. Your synopsis has inconsistent spacing at the end of sentences, for example. Also, the POV change in chapter 9 is very abrupt. There are several ways to improve this. You can remove it by having Luella eavesdrop, having another character provide a "flashback" (having the scene written in 2nd person perspective), or improving the transition/making POV changes more common throughout the story so it doesn't seem like a unique exception. This, of course, is nitpicking but correcting these errors will provide a professional sheen to your work.
Also, the time-period in which this story takes place was not known for the economic empowerment of women (i.e. women didn't often pursue private careers). This wouldn't occur until the late 1920s, or arguably WW2. This isn't really an issue as there were women who had careers at the time, but they were not incredibly common. Nothing really has to change in your novel, I just thought that seeing some character conflict arising from this social issue would be interesting to see in your story.
I love the title (just make sure to capitalize every word except "the"); it fits very well with the plot thus far. I also really like the story format when you include the date after the page break, in the beginning of chapter on. That would be awesome to see you continue with that throughout your story.
I seriously cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed this story. It isn't very often that an author makes me enjoy a genre a do not read frequently. The relationship building is fantastic and creative. I cannot wait to see more. I will definitely be returning to this story in the future!
Read the story now