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Edward Mandell House. The House family was originally Dutch, by name Huis. The Colonel's father settled in Texas while it was part of Mexico, lived there through its revolution, its independence, its entrance into the Union, its secession and its return. He was a leading citizen of Texas and left his son a fortune that was comfortable but not superfluous. Edward M. House was reared in an atmosphere of war, violence, gunplay. His college career at Cornell was impaired by his frequently playing hookey to become a spectator of the game of politics, and ended at his father's death. In Texas as a young man he made himself famous as a political manager, by electing three governors in succession, each of them over the opposition of the political machine. Not until 1911 did he feel the time was opportune to enter national politics. He began to "interview" possible candidates. Late in the year he met Governor Wilson of New Jersey, and at once an intimacy sprang up between the two men.
FICTION
Red Hot Togas
GLASS HOUSES—Eleanor Gizycka—Minion, Balch ($2). Senators have fun. Particularly the big he-ones from unshackled western states. This book leaves no doubt of it. They are pursued even in their grave assembly room by panting Washington women with devastating toilets and merciless divan technique. Second only to senators in desirability are titled young attaches at the embassies. For one of these a Washington flapper will do unvirtuously anything.
Eleanor Gyzicka, sister of Joseph Medill (Chicago Tribune) Patterson and niece of the late Robert S. McCormick (sometime U. S. ambassador to Russia and Austria) met Count Joseph Gyzicki (Austrian-Pole) in St. Petersburg and Vienna diplomatic life, marrying him in 1904.** She has long adorned and stimulated the chic milieu of which she writes. Photographs released to the public prints reveal her as an attractive, dark beauty well on the mentionable side of 35, posing in silks beside sophisticated bookshelves, cigaret in hand, large black eyes bent upon the beholder from beneath a high, thoughtful brow.
Her heroine, Mary Moore, is a creature of similar appearance, whose Wyoming nativity urges her into the wide open spaces of ex-Senator Bob Millar of that state.† Her cosmopolitan sophistication inclines to dapper young Count André de Servaise. Both men are out to marry money, of which Mary has little. A Wyoming interlude that might have been written by Elinor Glyn in collaboration with Harold Bell Wright and a Campfire Girl, eliminates Millar—and Mary's chastity. When she finally marries André, whose constancy does not soar above the average for Latins, she discovers the comfort resident in observing the adage about glass houses and stone-flinging.
The story should screen exceedingly well and make its author some money. Nor should it sell badly in book form. The wholesome wild-western setting of Mary's seduction will reassure a vast public that might be disconcerted by the plentiful bits of smart writing and the gratuitous, but fastidious, indoor carnalities.
In Demand
UNCHANGING QUEST—Philip Gibbs—Doran ($2). Averaging the reports of leading bookstores from Portland, Ore., to Boston, one finds that of all fiction published this year this book is most in demand.