A Necessary Woman by Helen Van Slyke It's a clean scan, but as usual, please don't struggle with any indecipherable parts should you find any. Just send me a note and I'll rescan the offending passages. <smile> Here's the synopsis. The chance winning of a door prize-a cruise to the South Pacific-changed the life of thirty-eight-year-old Mary Farr Morgan and those nearest to her. A thousand uncertainties preceded that bleak winter morning when she sailed from San Francisco, leaving behind the charming, unrealistic husband she'd loved and supported for fifteen years. When she returned, she would have made the most important decision of her life; whether to stay married to a man she pitied but could not respect. During the long days at sea, Mary reviewed her disappointments and doubts: the early desire for parental approval, always withheld; the longing for closeness to a jealous, hostile sister; the job she loved and the threat it presented to her marriage. And through the eyes of her traveling companion, her beloved twenty-one-year-old niece, Jayne, she came also to a new outlook on life. The girl's liberated forthrightness forced Mary to face her own emotions head on, including her passion for Christopher Andrews, a fellow passenger who was everything she'd dreamed of in a man . . . and everything her conscience rejected. With fascinating, personalized glimpses of such exotic places as Bali, Hong Kong, and the People's Republic of China, A Necessary Woman is really the story of two women and two generations-Mary in the middle of her life and Jayne in the beginning of hers. Interwoven, theirs are the conflicts of all modern women caught between the demands of duty and the need for survival. In a world where each searches for happiness, Mary and Jayne emerge with different solutions to a single problem-how to be true to oneself as. a woman, in an honest, necessary way.