The inscription reads, ‘To my very[underlined] dear friend David Sandelson - this is my first book about the scenes and people we knew together. William Gerhardi. May 1935 London’. From the Preface, Edith Wharton writes that he has, ‘enough of the true novelist’s “objectivity” to focus the two so utterly alien races to whom he belongs almost equally, by birth and bringing-up - the English and Russian - to sympathize with both, and to depict them for us as they see each other’. A very smart copy.