THE LOVE RIDDLE

A sweetmeat follows the love and life lines of Constantine Doanides, a wealthy industrialist; Cynthia, his only daughter by the wife who had left him with a lover after he had taken a shot at them both in bed; and Irene, Cynthia's former schoolmate, now a prostitute in Athens out of work and money who comes to stay with Cynthia and stays on with Constantine as his wife. Cynthia is offered an escape, however, when she falls in love with Charles O'Hara, a newspaperman. He marries her and takes her to Cairo where he is shot on an assignment, not on an assignation as she had believed (he really was an intelligence officer). Later after devoting herself to his memory and to good works, she falls in love again, this time with Ronald Merlyn, married to an older woman. She returns with Ronald to London, to live on a back street, bear his child, and then there's the terminal confrontation scene. Ronald's wife is her mother..... If love's riddle is a real Jolt, it may also come as something of a surprise that this is a translation. It's hard to think where it was written as well as when.