Picture of an unprincipled, personally ambitious woman, realizing, too late, that what she has achieved doesn't count. Not a pretty picture, this of a modern Scarlet O'Hara, without Scarlett's magnetism. A department store career, marriage in which she uses a man's love and the contacts she has made to further her own ends, ultimately resulted in a wrecked life, victim of her own methods. A more solid picture than the usual one of a woman driven by the business she is in to sacrifice everything for her individual ends, rationalizing the means justifying them. The author won the Carl Bohnenberger medal for Fox in the Cloak, in 1938.