Books: Witch

BOXFIRE—Dorothy Canfield—Harcourt, Brace (§2.50). Like many another champion of sweetness & light. Authoress Canfield cannot refrain from hitting her strawman adversary below the belt. In Bonfire her enthusiasm leads her into such palpable fouls that even her partisans may well shake their heads, deprecating these groin punches that mar an otherwise pretty exhibition of sparring. Anna Craft was district nurse in a little Vermont community where everyone knew everything about every one else. Anna was a realist but she had too many ideals for her own comfort. Chief ideal was her younger brother Anson, for whom she had slaved away her youth so that he could go to medical school, then fill his father’s shoes as local doctor. When Anson turned up on schedule. Anna even had a wife picked out for him. Not unnaturally, Anson resented having his sister run his life, felt uncomfortably bound by his debt to her. Ambitious and able, he would much rather have gone into research, loathed the small-town society to which he felt condemned. Lixlee was an ignorant, half-savage backwoods girl whom well-meaning Anna had “rescued”‘ and started off as a maid-of-all-work. Lixlee was a natural born maneater. Having a slight cast in one eye. her direct gaze (which she rarely unleashed) had a disturbingly hypnotic effect, especially on men. She knocked Anson over with the first glance. Married to Lixlee and enjoying a completely pagan nightlife, he perked up considerably. One night, because he had to tear himself from her arms to go to a dying woman, they quarreled. Pretty soon he began to suspect that somebody else’s hat was on the hatrack. His jealousy and shame drove him to drink. Lixlee was diabolically cunning, never let him get any proof, though apparently she took on any handy man, at any hour. If Authoress Canfield is to be believed, Lixlee was not only a nymphomaniac but a sadist; finally she turned golddigger and ran off with the town’s rich old bachelor. Anna, married now herself, could no longer help her brother in the old maternal way, but her matchmaking reaches a successful issue when her candidate came back to town and picked up Anson’s alcoholic pieces.