Books: Modern Paragon

DOUBTFUL JOY—Elizabeth Jenkins— Donbleday Doran ($2).

Last year addicts of horror stories hailed Elizabeth Jenkins’ Harriet as a masterpiece of its kind. Harriet told the story of a pathetic, dim-witted woman driven to death by four handsome youngsters who were fearsome only in their unconsciousness of their guilt. Critics saw tricks of style and manner that suggested Author

Jenkins had gone to school to Henry James, put her down as a writer of subtlety and power. Last week Author Jenkins offered a novel that gave proof, at least, of her versatility: a breezy little romance about a schoolteacher who fell in love with a cinemactor.

Lily MacMillan considered herself a “bright, affectionate girl who knows nothing.” She was happy with her pleasant work, her sophisticated friends, her artful practice of dodging disagreeable situations. Lovely to look at, light and gracious. Lily “told no anecdotes about admirers, or humorous scrapes in which she herself appeared as a figure of good entertainment value; she did not take out her mirror and gaze, spellbound, at her own reflection; there was nothing consciously graceful about any of her gestures.” This paragon of modern virtue fell in love with Lionel

Ackerly, who was married to a nice woman whose heart he had broken so many times that she had forgotten how to cry.

Lily became conscious of her love with panic. When she found herself talking with affected girlishness she was shocked, but felt queerly exalted and lightheaded: “It was not entirely a pleasant sensation, having in it something of the faint excitement and distress that accompanies flying in dreams.” Ackerly, a sea captain who had been drafted to do character bits, possessed a quality that Lily considered secretive glamour but which U. S. readers may put down as plain British dullness. Lily was finally ready to run away with him. But after one look at the dingy, unromantic week-end quarters he had found for them, she raced home to mother.