Some Early Autumn Novels

AS the home of pleasant dalliance, high-hearted fair ladies, and a Barriesque unworldliness, Virginia provides romance-weavers with a fabric ready-made. Stephena Cockrell takes heart of grace from this fact and adds another novel to the away-down-south-in-Dixie list. She goes about the task with a directness arguing a magazine apprenticeship. The ever vernal poor girl-rich boy theme is introduced with legato variations. An opening scene in which an ant covered antique hinge is concealed by the ingenue, Sally, in her silk unmentionables only to be hastily plucked forth as the man, Richard Clarke, curio collector, appears for the first time, constitutes good bait for the reader. Unfortunately, the pace slows down after this.

It requires a naive temperament to follow without impatience the "Hinge of Heaven" plot progress. The girl Sally is supposedly a businesslike per- son but she insists on several hundred pages of futile wing-fluttering before her cheek is "mashed gorgeously" on Richard Clarke's waistcoat buttons. Whatever suspense exists, the reviewer did not discover it