More Early Autumn Novels

IN "The Bride's Progress you can find whatever meaning you are seeking. The married man of years, steeped in maturity, will find in wholesome social-comedy style a clever, epigrammatic bit of marriage philosophy. The unmarried college student will find a daring piece of ironic comedy, a novel of the most risque caliber.

The book deals with a wedding breakfast in a removed alcove of the Cafe de Paris at Carezzio, on the Riviera. Gerald Cairns, a sophisticated playwright, who has just succeeded in obtaining a divorce from his first wife, has been married by the British Consul to an idealistic ingenue of an Irish girl named Helen, who has nursed him through a four years' illness. The bibulous Consul Cheyne, his wife Gabrialle, an unscrupulous French ex-harlot, Helen's Dutch friend, warm sensuous Jenny van Haaren who struggles--at intervals--against her infatuation for Gerald, and Hilary Bentinck, the worldly-wise though disillusioned lawyer who has handled the divorce, comprise the members of the party.

Despite the limitations of space and style selected by the author a well knit, compelling novel has been evolved. As a recorder of the current of emotion florving and ebbing in society at a wedding breakfast, it probably remains alone in the field.