BROKEN BRIDGES.*
" Tam wordy novels of Dickens and his contemporaries . . . are for the studious girl between fourteen and eighteen ; and the more heavily does she stuff her head with them, so is her following taste fluffy and ephemeral." We do not know whether the author of Broken Bridges means us to take this pronouncement as a confession or a boast. If a confession, we bow our head, though we still think Miss Linford has been over-ingenious in tracing the source of her shortcomings. If a boast, why drag in Dickens ? He certainly would not have helped Rachel Silver to an under- standing of the facts of sex. He would have left her, with her bridges intact, free to come and go along the avenues of her past life—avenues to which, thanks to a series of painful awakenings and revelations, she was to be successively denied access. The shadow of each new love obscured its predecessor. Hugh Senior's immature caresses troubled the cherished (Continued on page 430.) `Broken Bridges. By Madeline Linford. London: Leonard Parsons. 170. Gd.1
image of Rachel's ritualistic school ; only to be obliterated, in their turn, by the more equivocal embraces of Philip Frew. He was a married man, and many, without Rachel's special reverence for the innocence of her early years, would have thought the work of demolition had gone far enough ; yet when, as a war-worker, her employer subjected her to a " crescendo of passion," she felt that another bridge had given way.
Miss Linford's style limps, too many nouns being dwarfed by a panoply of adjectives, too many verbs harnessed to headstrong adverbs. She seldom denies herself a metaphor, and continually overstates, overreaching her meaning for the sake of emphasis. Lips that are " dewily scarlet " fail to allure us. Yet a considerable talent underlies her work, quick observation and a just perception of relationships, especially of relationships between women.
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