For her seventeenth novel, Fannie Hurst provides a midwestern background -- icinity, ""a typical suburban town"". Nella Fox is her heroine -- relentlessly middle-class and living out the bouregois istaff daydream, viz., that a woman over thirty five an find true romance; that she can find a pot of gold in a business to which she is not committed in any unfeminine career sense; and that the female heart has two main arteries -- through one flows mother love and through the other passion, with neither pumping any oxygen to the brain. Nella's stale first marriage produced a son whose death is caused by a mixed up teenager, Lenny, who (oddly enough) is placed with her for raising by a social welfare agency that should have had its collective head examined. Lenny, alternately cozened by Nella's maternal yearnings and her vengeful spleen, at least takes her mind off Gilchrist, the ""silly boy"" dance instructor whom she had started buying before her husband died. He skipped off with another, but that's all right. She bought him back later with the fabulous profits from her cosmetic busines....A feminine readership who will arrive at this dead end by way of Back Street.