DARCOURT

Not as good as Miss Holland's last, since everything grows too luxuriantly under her green typewriter thumb on a South Carolinian plantation island where Darcourt, old Southern seigneur, lives in voluntary, impregnable isolation. With his daughter, Alix, who's as wild as the scorpions and coral snakes in the moss--Alix whom Sally Wainwright is supposed to tutor--while actually she's looking for her own past behind louvered shades. Alix keeps running away toward that swamp of an earlier tragedy. . . but what are the strange spots on her cheeks? and where is her mother, wasting away? But since there's a nearby place called St. Damien's you should be able to make your own diagnosis. All chain-plotted on the principle of the more the worse, the more the better for the ladies who like it that way. Still, it's a little much.