A YOUNG GIRL GOING OUT OF THE DOOR

Amy Cooper is the Girl Who Has Everything except direction, outward or inward. At twelve she had announced for architecture because Young John Lovell was going to design havens for the poor when he grew up. Now, after ""finishing"" at Deephollow, she is adrift in Paris, drawing desultorily and sliding into an understanding with older dilettante Emery Long; then Emery's wife returns, and instead of a divorce there's a reconciliation. Fleeing to New York, Amy takes a threshold job on a modish art magazine where she meets painter Philip Tennant, rude and refreshing and self-absorbed. His needling and the ever-fresh memory of John Lovell impel her to study architecture at last, and she takes to it handsomely. With graduation approaching, she returns to Curlew Couny where she and John were children -- and finds that he is building matchboxes on her hills and glades: he never became an architect, thinks only of making money. She has a hope of redeeming him, quickly dashed by his father: John only wants her for her money too. But there's still Philip, finally willing to give and take. Pretentious' premises and utterly false dialogue but oh so seductive.