Is it trite to suggest that this might have been called Life with Alice? For that is what it is, rather than straight biography. It is also a story of a successful marriage, made up of day scraps from life's scrapbag, pieced together into a crazy quilt of reminiscences, specdotes, quotations from her writings, a miscellany of excerpts and passages from familiar -- but not always notable -- sources, and composing in all a nostalgic recapturing of a way of life that is no more, as well as etching in sharp portraiture, two very definite personalities. It has a certain indefinable charm, and a good deal of snob appeal.