Evening star., 1925-07-05

years of separation and miSunder-
standing. While this problem is work
ing out through manv makeshiftS on
the part of the lady and plain straight
forward behavior on the part of the
man, the children themselves, a boy
and a girl, grow into the years when
they, too, begin to have questions of
their own to settle.
And so the matter merges into the
girls romance and her marriage to
young American. This event gives
Philip Gibbs an opportunity to say
all over again many of the things
that he has been saying ever since the
war-things bearing upon the rela-
tions between America and England,
things relating to the effect of the
war upon his own country-a full
theme for him; one, too, that he ap-
proacheS in deep earnestness and in a
big spirit. And, indeed, whether he is
writing novels or reporting a war or
discussing public events, one has the
feeling that the master preoccupation
of Sir Philip Gibbs is the well being of
England and, thereby, the well being
of the world itself. This preOccupa-
tion makes him less certain and less
convincing in his approach upon the
women of his novels. He doesn't
know them as his two brothers know
their women. A deep chivalry and a
dealing with a woman along the line
that he has set for her to travel. With
his men he is strong and reassuring
and fine. However, who shall find a,
word of fault with so true q spirit,
with so clear a mind and withal, with
SO good an art in the general telling
of story, just because the fiber of
the man shrinks from entertaining
the woman whom he has invited?
CARNIVAL COLORS. BY Maude
Radford Warren, author of "The
House of Youth" Indianapolis:
The Bobbs- Merrill Co.
THE mental and spiritual color of
average humanity, could this be
drawn off in its prevailing hue, would
without doubt register uniform and
somewhat muddy drab Such glints
of orange and crimson, of sapphire
and emerald and gold as appeared
here and there would be due largely
TO the reds and the rebels, TO those re
fusing to conform to the conventional
outlook which has set the color of the
mass. Attractive to the eye. these
flashes of human briIliance, but dam
gerouS to the safe common habit of
life which has been secured through
endless personal inhibitions for the
sake of the common veal.
This author, for the purposes of the
novel in hand, has envisaged a group
of these eXotics in the midst of the
monotone of average existence, set
around each of the members of this
group. Three generations of women
constitute the medium through which,
in a world all conformity, the inheri-
tance of beauty, of the joy of life,
of the pursuit Of happiness at any
cost, makes its unequal way to defeat
or to the thin heaven reserved for an
eleventh-hour repentance. A respect
able. Well-todo community gives staid
background to the unruly action of
the story. The usual brand of hus-
band, the average run of family life
plain, plodding, open-these provide
the barricade on the other side of
which happiness beckons to these reb-
els against a life of straight, checker
board lines. And things couldn't be
worse for the first two of these three
generations of women. 1t is for the
third one, daughter and granddaugh-
ter of the other two, to pick up the
pieces, to fit them to a seemly whole
ness, to set her house of women and
their tradition into the path OF sanity
and a tempered happiness. Whether