I. ROBERTA

Viewed through a Victorian stereopticon which makes many things possible (antimacassared accessories; domestic truths rather than real insights; even a few cliches) this is the story of Roberta Ewing Kent Morelli, living alone with her young son Kent and selling the family (very old Philadelphia) crystal to keep going. She had submitted to, then married, an Italian hired man who had abandoned her and taken off with her mother's money. Now she is approached by his second wife (bigamous), Grace, who offers everything to the boy she wants to adopt--money, private school, other children's company, religion, and the love which Roberta, a hard-headed woman whose lips seem permanently pursed, has not really given him. As she faces the choice which Solomon arbitrated, she looks back over her life in the past, seems able to change it in the future... Of its kind, established, a story that really reads and a comfortable choice for older (fashioned) women.