Books: Return of Cytherea

THE PARTY DRESS—Joseph Hergesheimer—Knopf ($2.50).

This is Author Hergesheimer's first novel since 1926, his first novel of contemporary U. S. life since Cytherea.

Nina Henry, fair, slim, 40, has just bought her first Paris dress. It makes her husband uneasy, herself unusually alluring, other men unusually allured. At a party at the country club she almost forgets she is the mother of two grown children, a respectable matron in a small U. S. town. When she meets Chalke Ewing, a Cuban sugar planter who hates the U. S., the expatriate brother of her...