The Daily Alaska empire., 1951-04-04
T H ESE D A Y s By GEORGE E. SOKOLSKY
Neither Five nor Three

| uO lOI nave Hidiiy OppOTCuTltles
 to read novels, but once started
 Helen MacInnes's Neither Five
 Nor Three," I could not put it down.
 This is a story that in a quiet
 easy manner produces the process
 of the corruption of fine people
 by Communist conspirators who
 know what they are doing-and are
 really the only ones in the group
 who know what they are doing. They
 naturally go after youth, which is
 romantic, and after college boys and girls who have potentialities of Ftraine usefulness.
 I was most fascinated by the | character of Thelma, because l know her so we'll She is the rich | girl who lives on Park Avenue and sells her soul for another thrill. All her life she has been seeking thrills. She does not really contribute any thing to life, except what money will buy, which, of course, is not l too much.
 Happiness she never finds. She is too active ever to be happy. She lacks the courage to stop chasing her tail, as the expression goes. If she stopped. she might have to look at herself, to become acquain- ted with herself, and to discover that there is nothing to her life but such biological activities which she pursues without knowing why The thrills she seeks never satisfy her because she is only spectator in an act, never true participant. know such women. They usually possess inherited wealth, earned by decent, hard-working parents or grandparents of whom they are ashamed because they were not in tellectuals. They often call them selves liberals and belong to every thing. They join movements on the left and some of them have even become deeply involved in such obscenities as the theft of the atom bomb, by giving dinner parties at which the thieves met, their filthy plots to unfold.
 They are not evil women; they are dupes and often dopes, al- though their parents sent them to the best universities where they came to know the insides of books but little of the cultivation of the spirit. They move from husband to husband, for men grow tired of wives whose minds have become so global that they do not recognize the dust on their own window-sills. Their children are abandoned to progressive educational methods which tend to distort their person. alities by overemphasizing their faults.
 Tn the end, such women grow wearisome, and even their many movements and societies and clubs seek younger blood Their liberal- ism turns to Communism, because when their minds are sufficiently dulled, they seek an orthodoxy diff ferent from the one they deserted in their youth. They want to be told what to believe and they accept the dictates of fools wi.ile reject ing the experience of ages. They accept disciplines from conspirators which they denied when counseled by their parents for good reasons. Curious, started discussing Miss MacInnes's novel, Neither Five Nor Three" and wandered into dis cussion of the so-called liberal woman who has become pest in most communities, injecting alien ideas, projecting queer individuals and insisting upon her way or no way, often smearing and attacking those who differ, employing cliches to bring to heel those who thwart her will or ambitions, and always paying money for admission into the company she keeps.
 Thelma plays only short bit in
 this novel, but it held me and l considered a list of names to see if I could find the one Miss Mac fnnes means. But they are type. | and l cannot help wondering how
 our colleges came to produce these unhappy women. I meet them ev-
 erywhere, but they proliferate best,
 think. in New York, Chicago and
 Los Angeles.
 Perhaps it is because having di-
 yorced themselves from God, they
 nave filled the void with nothing.
 And nature abhors vacuum even
 nore than the abnormalfties of a
 ,ancerous growth Thus. they be-
 come not only miserable. but re-
 fleet the ugliness of degenerative
 .pirit. They dare not know of the
 ministry of God: nor can psy-
 chiatrist fill the void of their own
 making.
 They are really torsuicd souls who
 m the end can only destroy every
 thing about them as they have
 destroyed themselves. Their tastes f.