Fiction
CREWE TRAIN. By Rose Macaulay. "(Collins.' 7s. 841. net.)—Miss Macaulay disarms criticism by permitting one of her: characters—who is in the publishing business—to assert that " all adverse reviews are written by one's enemies." Yet at the risk of, claiming too much familiarity with the witty authoress, one must allow that Crewe Train is less amusing than her Orphan Island. It introduces into an intellectual English family a very child of nature, a girl brought up abroad. whose idea of happiness is rough clothing, a wet day, and eggs and bacon fried on a smelly oil-stove in a comfortless cottage perched above a stormy sea. This Denham Dobie marries an elegant young publisher and continues to ask why anything and everything she meets in Chelsea and Bloomsbury should be. She is never answered satisfactorily.
The tale is gay and entertaining, scrappy and inconclusive. It introduces personalities and even social events which are easily recognizable, though all are given Miss Macaulay's touch of caricature and absurdity. Many of the principal characters are delightful, especially an aesthetic mischief- maker, by name Mrs. Gresham, but there is too much bitter- ness and completeness in the clipping of poor Denham's wings. It does not quite convince.
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