Word: leda
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...their youth. As a result Raymond Holden's Chance Has A Whip emerges as particularly refreshing, with at least one extended section that is calculated to remain long in readers' memories. The grand passion in Hendrick Fillmore's life is his love for beautiful, dark-eyed Leda Putnam, daughter of the founder of the Buffalo steel company of which Hendrick is secretary. With two children of his own, and a sharp-tongued wife, Hendrick is in no position cheerfully to surrender himself to his passion. In addition to these barriers, Leda runs away from him when...
...discovery that his wife is deceiving him enables Hendrick to escape from her without ending his sense of responsibility toward his children. He worries over business, sees a strike in the factory, feels himself going to pieces when he finds Leda again. Learning that she loves him, he finds happiness for the first time in his introspective life. During their Manhattan idyl, Hendrick's wife sets detectives after them as Leda is recovering from an abortion. They flee to Europe, are appalled to discover that Hendrick's 10-year-old daughter, Margot, is traveling on the same boat...
High point of Chance Has A Whip, describing the delicate relationship of father, mistress and daughter, has a muffled, tragic quality that recalls the best writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The disapproving lady who has charge of Margot frowns upon her intimacy with Leda and her father. When Hendrick, apologizing for the trouble his daughter causes his mistress, casually remarks that she is not a very attractive child, Margot overhears him. When, to make up for that cruelty, they become more attentive and tender with her, their days are darkened by a terrible conviction that she has surprised them together...
...older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids...
Often very odd; Leda's was a story...