Stoops to Folly

THE STATE VERSUS ELINOR NORTON-- Mary Roberts Rinehart--Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

Authoress Mary Roberts Rinehart has written too many sensible murder stories for her own good. When in The State versus Elinor Norton she tries to show a lovely woman stooping to folly and finding too late that men betray, ghosts of The After House, The Door and The Album rise up to prevent her.

Elinor Norton is a poor little rich girl of the pre-War period. Her mother's plans for her do not include marriage to Carroll, summer neighbor who tells the story. Carroll is always in love with Elinor, but she is too much under her mother's thumb to feel affection for anybody. When her mother arranges a match with Socialite Lloyd Norton, it goes through as planned. Elinor and Carroll, moving in different social worlds, drift apart. After the War he meets her again, sees that her marriage is a failure. Lloyd has become an impotent neurotic while Elinor has fallen in love with a handsome English remittance man named Blair. Elinor, Lloyd and Blair go West, set up a menage `a trois on a Montana ranch. In the inevitable quarrel Blair kills Lloyd but makes it look like an accident. When Elinor finally realizes, after months of living together, that Blair has no intention of marrying her, she shoots him. A wide-open Western jury acquits her and her warm-hearted authoress marries her off to long-suffering Carroll.

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