(& yes I know they were fictional characters)
That's OK, we all do it with stories that catch our imagination.
Maybe I'm of a more cynical turn of mind than you, but I rather doubt Annette would have been able to change her spots so completely. Even her mother knew she was spoiled and pampered; in my mind, once she was out of the lap of luxury, her infatuation with Giff palled and she began to feel that he simply wasn't good enough for her.
A couple of years later, she was visiting Giff at an exclusive private country club in the Hamptons where he was working as a tennis coach, when she met an heir to a lumber fortune from New England, and began the first of a series of impulsive affairs with men who could satisfy her daddy-infatuation and give her the attention she craved, not really caring whether they were single or not. Giff, heart-broken when he discovered what was happening, botched an ill-judged attempt at suicide by drinking acid, by getting drunk first to build up his courage, then clumsily spilling the acid on his own face instead. With his looks destroyed, he lost what made him appealing for employment by the rich and image-conscious. He settled into a haze of alcoholism and soul-destroying financial dependence on Annette's dwindling inheritance.
For her part, Annette finally fell prey to the same fate that had destroyed her mother's marriage: she discovered she was pregnant — scandalously, adulterously pregnant — and Giff was not the father. Spurned by her married lover when she revealed her condition, she turned to her mother for succour and refuge; but her mother, traumatised and hardened by her own experience aboard the Titanic, and by watching the death of her own illegitimate child and of the husband she'd failed to convince herself she didn't love, was too shocked and confronted by Annette's condition, and turned her from her door. With no options left, and unable to face Giff again, Annette retreated into herself and went to live for a time with her mother's second cousin in a small rural town somewhere just outside Chicago, and quickly faded from any pretence of social life.
Embittered and forelorn, Giff made his own sad retreat into academia, and had only modest success, until he unexpectedly found solace in the arms, and the marriage-bed, of the first female professor of mathematics in the United States. No-one knows what finally became of Annette, or the baby she presumably bore.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.
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