FICTION: No Inhibitions

WELCOME HOME—Alice Duer Miller—Dodd Mead ($2). To compete with the fictional vogue for neuroses, stream-of-thought, documentary realism, Alice Duer Miller has done two novelettes, each with an actual plot: introduction, climax, denouement, elements as gratifying as they are oldfashioned.

One midnight, Bentham returns, not very “Welcome Home” from six years of South America, lets himself into his boyhood brownstone house, where not even the Irish caretaker is stirring. Memories of his late irascible father haunt him as he climbs to his old room which is filled with prep-school photos and trophies and the heavy perfume of flowers. In the sudden electricity, the most beautiful girl he ever saw sits bolt upright in the middle of his old bed, and orders him out of the house. He returns next day to find her vanished. But Author Miller can be relied upon to make out of her not the psychic fantasy of Bentham’s weary mind, but the heroine of an excellent movie scenario, rivaled as such only by “Her Mother’s Jewels” of the same volume.