Diana in a Green Hat

DIANA--Emil Ludwig--Viking ($5).

Young, intelligent, fatally beautiful, Diana von Wassilko is the kind of girl who gives and goes. In her coolly amorous passage through the social high spots of Europe, she has many calls on her generosity. When the story opens, she has just left one lover, an unripe Viennese poet, after an idyllic two weeks on a Mediterranean island. When her story ends, she has apparently lost her freedom but attained respectability by a morganatic marriage to a Middle-European prince. But between these two points the huntress of men has had good hunting: Diplomat Count Muensterberg, Millionaire Scherer, simple-minded Wilhelm, Bolshevik Kyril Sergeivitch, English Soldier Felix.

In her love-affairs, Diana is rarely the one to suffer; and Author Ludwig has so arranged matters that her willing victims, though never forgetful, always forgive. Between diversions, Diana is the capable secret agent and business adviser of canny Millionaire Scherer. Only once is she the cause of tragedy: a duel in which a former lover kills her present one. No introvert, Diana does not often brood; and when she does, her pessimism is only of the morning after. "To taste of everything just once--in order to be able to despise everything." In Diana, Author Ludwig has tried to give the ideal of modern emancipated woman: a realistic romantic, he has called her by the name of a goddess.

Emil Ludwig is chiefly famed for biographies (Napoleon, Bismarck, The Son of Man, July '14); Diana is his first novel to be translated into English.

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