Triangle or Circle? ,

PORTRAIT BY CAROLINE -- Sylvia Thompson -- Little, Brown ($2.50).

If you are in love with another man's wife or another woman's husband, what are you going to do about it? If you were really in such a fix, you would probably keep it as dark as possible, but if you are a novelist looking for human situations, you will tell as much as you can about everybody concerned, make a book of it. That is what Novelist Sylvia Thompson has done.

Caroline was intelligent and attractive. Her doctor-husband Maurice was a nice fellow though not very demonstrative. She had a daughter and a pleasant little English cottage. She painted well enough to give one-woman exhibitions in London. Then her husband's old school friend, Peter Stanley, took a cottage near them. He wanted quiet to write a book in, country air to breathe. The three saw a lot of each other; Caroline painted Peter's picture. All of a sudden Caroline found she was in love with him. But she was pretty sure she still loved her husband too. Just the same she might have given herself to Peter, but he decided against it and stuck to his decision long enough to get away. When Caroline told Maurice she and Peter were in love, he made things more difficult by taking it very well and trusting them completely. Caroline went off to London in a pet and spent the night with a man she despised. When she got home to find her little daughter down with pneumonia, she thought it was a punishment. Then Peter discreetly went away. Caroline thought her heart was breaking, but perhaps would wake up some morning and find she was glad things had fallen out as they did.

The Author. Sylvia Thompson (Mrs. Peter Luling), 28, is a Scottish-born descendant of Oliver Cromwell, married to a U. S. painter. She was "sent down" (expelled) from Somerville College, Oxford, for not working. She thinks men & women should go to separate universities.. With her husband and their two daughters, she lives in a Cotswold cottage near Stratford-on-Avon. A story-teller from infancy, Sylvia Thompson made up a story when she was four which her family still like better than anything she has written since. It ended: "And when she came around the corner, what do you think she saw? She saw the Fairy Queen and Queen Victoria sitting on a toadstool." Sylvia Thompson has also written: The Hounds of Spring, The Battle of the Horizons, Chariot Wheels.

Portrait by Caroline is .the January choice of the Book League of America.

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