Rubicon Double-Crossed

WIFE TO CAESAR--Berthe K. Mellett-- Brewer, Warren & Putnam ($2).

In Wife to Caesar, as in her first novel The Ellington Brat, Authoress Mellett places her characters along the Potomac's stormy northeast bank. A Washingtonian, wife of the Scripps-Howard editor of the Washington Daily News, she has seen great political and social lions grow from little cubs. The results of her bright-eyed observation she sets down in an excited, exciting style. With its high-pressure people, its journalistic plot, her rather amateurish novel somehow manages to be one of the most characteristically U. S. productions of the year.

Like most Caesars, Blount Marvel is divided into two parts. His better half, Leda, was born more sophisticated than Blount will ever be, but she loves him for his pink & white good humor, his boyish manliness. When he is sent to Washington as Representative from a backward Southern State, Leda accompanies him, cooks, washes dishes, keeps their flat as homelike as Blount's narrow purse will allow. From a small glass works back home comes all his spending money. Leda fears that Blount's political career will be cramped, his radiant self-assurance dimmed. After a few days in Washington Blount fears so too.

Who should turn up but Garry Clune, Leda's girlhood love. Clune has made a fortune, is married, but far from settled down. The memory of Leda has tormented him for years. He invites her and Blount out to his Virginia estate, and Leda, against her better judgment, but for the sake of Blount's possible advantage, accepts. Advantages soon follow. De Long, a friend of dune's, takes an interest in Blount's glass works, an interest in Blount's wife. He introduces her to Judith Webster. Washington's star socialite, whose husband is a power in the House of Representatives. Blount soon begins to find success in politics as simple as rolling a log. Before he knows it he is a Senator.

But things are not so simple for the others. Clune's wife, Kathy, with whom Leda makes great friends, is half crazy with unsatisfied love of him; but he wants only Leda. Failing to get her he sets off to the War with suicidal intent. To hold him back, for Kathy as well as for herself, Leda gives herself to him, but he goes to War just the same. When she bears a child Blount, who is impotent, thinks it is his. Leda does not undeceive him. He has grown more & more powerful, more & more self-assured during Wartime politics. But wise Leda knows on what a frail basis his necessary self-assurance stands. When Clune comes, crippled, back from the front Leda will not tell even him whose child she has borne, sends him back to Kathy to make the best of her. Her incomparable management has enabled her two true loves to double-cross their Rubicons.

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