Little French Girl

*Little French Girl

Old Dog Tray Becomes the Fairy Prince

The Story. Madame Vervier was an exquisite person. Her salon in Paris, her garden at Cannes, her sunny cottage on the cliffs of Brittany were filled with other exquisite persons-- savants, artists, connoisseurs of life. Madame Vervier was a powerful person, important to all who knew her, all important to more than one. If she left her husband for a lover and then had other loves, that was courageous as well as reckless. If she forfeited her position in le monde, that was her affair. Madame Vervier lived true to her lights; and they were clear, honest lights.

But there was Alix, her daughter, a grave, dark child in her mid-teens. Alix spent half the year with her father's father, the remainder with Maman, under the terms of the divorce. Tradition, strongest in the outcast, dictated innocence for a jeune fille; ultimately a husband, un foyer. For jungle life outside society's pale, however free and beautiful, had its fierce dangers, its pain. A mother seeks to spare her daughter these--and Madame Vervier was a devoted mother.

There was no question of Alix's innocence. Maman had many friends, was resourceful as well as exquisite. When Captain Owen Bradley, their charming English visitor at Cannes, visited them in Paris on his leaves from the front, all three laughed and made merry together. He talked much about "Toppie," waiting for him at home and showed them her saintly face in a locket. He talked of how Alix would see Toppie and all his family, in England, after the War.

Then Captain Owen was killed. To pay a debt of hospitality and to hoard more memories of him, his family asked Madame Vervier to let them have Alix for the Winter. To keep Alix innocent and to put her in the way of a safe marriage, Madame Vervier was more than willing.

The Bradleys were like bread and butter, so kindly and useful. Giles Bradley, Captain Owen's plain and philosophic younger brother, worshipped the austere Toppie hopelessly. He made Alix feel wonderfully safe. When Alix discovered that Maman had been more to Captain Owen than Toppie had been, and that he had betrayed them both by not telling his family of the Paris visits, life would have been unbearable without Giles' understandstanding. He went with her to France, met Maman, understood her too. He saw how necessary a safe English marriage was for Alix and, with the fidelity of Old Dog Tray, led her back to England to find one. But Alix was no longer a jeune fille. When Jerry Hamble, utterly eligible, proposed, she was too anglicized to marry him without loving him. Besides, everyone found out about Maman's irregularities. There was nothing to do but return to France and stand by Maman in the inevitable tragedy of her advancing years.

Thus all hung for a moment upon Toppie. When she retired to a convent to end her days in ghostly communion with her dead disloyal Owen, Giles came to himself, crossed the Channel, was changed from Old Dog Tray into the Fairy Prince.

The Significance. For its acute penetration of the French and English tempers, its rich, complete personalities, its sure, translucent substantiation of subtle motives, its warm humanity, its rare good taste and rarer good humor, this is as fine a book as one might ask for. The dignity of mind and manner are those of a gentlewoman; the cool, easy prose and the bookmanship are those of a gentlewoman of letters.

The Author. Anne Douglas Sedgwick, though born in Englewood, N. J., can scarcely be called an American writer. She is thought of as one, but with less reason than in the cases of other illustrious emigrants -- Edith Wharton and John Singer Sargent, for example. Her nine years of childhood in the U. S. were watched over by a governess before she went to live in France and England. Since then, 1882, she has seldom returned and never for long, though her many novels have reached the world through American publishers. Her home is in Oxfordshire ; her husband, Basil de Selincourt.

* The Little French Girl--Anne Douglas Sedgwick --Houghton Mifflin ($2.00).