(4 of 5)
Marietta is the prize daughter of the Malory family, so much livelier, prettier than her younger sister that Lucile never seems to have a chance. Yet Lucile gets engaged to Timothy Sheldon, whom Marietta fancies for herself. To stop the marriage she persuades her mother to have Lucile examined for tuberculosis; finds that she has a touch of it herself. In Switzerland, where she retires to recover, she meets up with young American Eugene Monk, becomes his mistress to spite herself. As soon as they get back to Paris she throws him over. To divert her jealousy of Timothy and Lucile, she starts on a round of amours. But with all the world to choose from her choice narrows down to her sister's husband. She finally succeeds in seducing him. Lucile discovers Timothy's infidelity, but soon after bears him twins, forgives him. He is only too glad to shake off desperate Marietta. She, now entirely hopeless, is put out of her troubles when her taxi skids into a dray.
Cream of a Decade
DRAWN FROM LIFE—S. J. Woolf—Whittlesey House ($5).
Some readers of the New York Times are going to feel cheated when they read this book. They will wonder why the man who writes the biographical sketches in the Sunday magazine section, with the drawing of the subject in the middle of the page, did not tell them all that he now has told in his book. Other more faithful Times readers will realize that much of Artist Woolf's material has already been published. Reading it again, and reading what has been added, they will acutely realize what an extraordinary reporter has been serving them these many years. His pictorial reporting of externals is so accurate and satisfying as to have become taken-for-granted. His equally accurate and satisfying reports of what he has observed behind famed faces have a cumulative effect when bound together. They form a most unusual glossary of the first figures of a decade.
Here are a number of celebrities from all important countries except the Orient. The important U. S. figures are all there, from the young Lindbergh to the venerable Holmes, with such curious exceptions as Henry Ford and Henry Lewis Stimson. The European gallery lacks Spain's recent Alfonso, England's George and in fact all other royalty.
Realism is the true reporter's touchstone. Cub newspapermen everywhere may with profit study the candor and simplicity with which this artist, alert and at all times objectively interested, sets down such minutiae as the differences in the cigar-smoking of Calvin Coolidge (knife and holder) and Herbert Hoover (fingernails and teeth), or the lineaments of Toscanini's left hand: