Selfless Life

THIS STRANGE Roberts Rinehart-($2.50).

Appropriate title for the author's departure from the safe realm of mystery and romance into the dangerous realism of thought and emotion--This Strange Adventure. Any woman--every woman-- is the theme; but the particular woman Mrs. Rinehart chooses is a delicate soul, and what little spirit she has is crushed and twisted by circumstance. The proverbially gay '90s are sufficiently Victorian to give "Missie" a sense of duty toward her elders--always she defers to them, always she forfeits her own happiness. First there was her father upon whom she and the rest of the household danced attendance. Then there was her lonely mother--tragic fat wreck of a plump burlesque-girl. Then there was her father's excessively respectable mother who adopted Missie, re-established her in society.

Thereupon pompous Wesley Dexter offered himself richly in marriage, and Missie dared not disappoint her grandmother by marrying the florist's son instead. Wesley proved unfaithful, unbearable; but Missie did not divorce him in spite of her love for an excellent man, the successor to the florist's son. The reasons: her sacred marriage vows, her duty to her son. That the son should turn on her years later seemed but the fitting sequel to a selfless, pathetic life.

Incidental characters Mrs. Rinehart creates with a sure touch--the chorus girl turned by marriage into a lumpy termagant; the stern old grandmother who indulges a reprobate son. But, often as not, her dramatic moments flare into melodramatic anticlimax: Missie, weary of a wasted life, staggers to her old home, turns on the gas stopcock, falls asleep. "As the sun rose it turned into burnished copper the tarnished gas bracket, through which no gas had flowed for many years, and beat pitilessly on her throat; that throat on which her life was etched with fine lines, and in which now the pulse was still throbbing, throbbing with the terrible vitality of women."