Intimations of Immorality

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN-- Stefan Zweig--Viking ($1.25).

Readers of Author Zweig's novelties will realize, to their horror, that the forsaken female of mid-Victorian romances is alive & kicking yet. The only modern touch about her reappearance is that she is deflowered by a hero who does not bother to ask her name. Famed Novelist R. (for Zweig?) returns to Vienna after his holidays to find among his customary fanmail a fat letter superscribed ''To you, who have never known me." He reads on to learn that the unknown woman's only child has just died, that she is going to pour out her heart to him, sole consolation of her miserable life. She starts pouring at the source, when, as a little girl she had watched R. move into an apartment across the hall from her family's flat. R. was so superior to anybody she had ever seen before, the women he brought home with him were so angelically bright, that the girl began to worship him. His doormat became sacred ground, his doorknob the shining star of love. Through thick & thin she pursued that star until, grown up, she at last waylaid him on the street, turned the blissful doorknob to her own account. Three nights they dallied, then R. went out of town. Slowly, reading the letter, he begins to realize that he was the father of her child. Lest she disturb him with the maintenance of herself and his child, for eleven years she took rich lovers. For his sake too she would not marry them. At last, in straitened circumstances, her child is dead and she is now dying. When he receives her letter she will be dead, alas!

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