byIshbel Ross. Harper, $4.00.

A biography of one of the most spectacular belles in American history, Kate Chase, daughter of Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury. Her consuming ambition was that her father should win the Presidency. Intelligent as well as arrestingly beautiful, she became Washington’s social leader in the Civil War era. After marrying the wealthy Governor Sprague, she was able to indulge her every whim. On her trips to Europe she thought nothing of buying a score of gowns from Worth or a fifty-thousand-dollar staircase. Her dinners, matinées dansantes, and receptions were the talk of Washington. But Kate’s tireless campaign for her father came to naught. After his death, she fell in love with the picturesque Roscoe Conkling, the Senate’s eloquent orator; and their six-year-long romance — a notorious scandal— carried Kate to the end of her heyday.