Another Somerset Maugham Pulping

I’ve blogged before about how regularly W. Somerset Maugham got pulped in the 1950s and 60s (see here). here’s another example – Nude Croquet and other Stories of the Joys and Terrors of Marriage (1970). The Maugham story is Force of Circumstance, which originally appeared in short story collection The Casuarina Tree (1926). The story line is, basically, A young woman marries a colonial administrator on home leave from the East and returns with him to his post. She is blissfully happy in her new life until a local woman and her small children begin to hang about the compound, to the increasing displeasure and discomfort of the young woman’s husband.  

The croquet must be in one of the other stories….