Edgar Rice Burroughs had been Very happy here, with his wife Florence-his second wife-and he had thought she felt the same.

Burroughs had well known the risks of marrying a younger woman. He had been sixty and Florence thirty-one-as his daughter Joan had cruelly pointed out, Florence was younger than the duration of her parents' marriage. Everyone seemed to be making the assumption that he was discarding his fifty-nine-year-old, overweight wife for the slender shapely former actress, out of the usual crassly selfish, male, sex-driven reasons.

The truth was more complex. Emma had always been plump, pleasantly so in her young, vivacious days, a "dumpling," as the old parlance went. In the early years of the marriage, even as her tendency toward stoutness increased, her intelligence and charm had made up for her excess weight After all, they had faced hardship, poverty and adversity together, theirs had been a marriage of closeness, of sharing. Emma would read his work and intelligently comment; his triumphs, his failures, had been hers-theirs, Jane to his Tarzan.

But their interests had diverged, drastically, over the past twenty years. Emma seemed to resent his youthful ways, shared not at all his interest in sports and the great out-of-doors-horseback riding, golf, tennis, certainly not flying. She would chastise him for his preference for the company of younger people, calling him "immature," accusing him of trying to "prove his masculinity."

The latter, in a marriage that had been sexless for some time, was a particularly cutting blow. But-despite the quarrels, and the recriminations-he had held on, out of concern for how his children might react to separation or divorce. With his business flourishing, he spent less and less time at home, doing his writing at the office, supervising the magazine serialization of his work, keeping an eye on the ticensing of Tarzan and other characters of his to the movies, radio, and comics.