The Party Dress

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1930. Unstated printing. Hardcover. [minimal wear to book, spine very slightly turned; the jacket is very attractive despite some heavy wear along the right edge of the front panel, with one small tear and some wrinkling along the top of the rear panel]. Infidelity among the country club set. "After forty years, Nina Henry looked in her mirror and found there a stranger in place of herself. Her first Paris dress had transformed her from a respectable young matron into an almost indecently beautiful woman. If that's what a dress does to you, she told herself, it is all wrong. It's immoral." Meanwhile, her husband is in love with another woman, and she herself becomes infatuated with a visiting Cuban sugar rancher. The dust jacket illustration is beautiful, but alas I can't quite make out the illustrator's teeny-tiny signature. One of the last novels by Hergesheimer, once considered one of America's most important novelists but long since out of fashion, out of print, and out of mind. .