Luke Braddock

THE NAKED MAN -- Vere Hutchinson--Century ($2). A man's dream of one woman, his lust for another, need of a third--these are his nakedness. A son,' conceived in drunkenness and evil, had stagnated in the murk of a coal mine for 13 years with but two gleams of light--the dream of a girl he had loved in boyhood, and the memory of a year spent convalescing from illness on an uncle's farm. Unexpectedly the farm was bequeathed to him. With his dull wife and the bitter memory of a stillborn son, he went to the land. He grew ambitious, fiery. Only his timid wife and the want of a son darkened his horizon. The mouselike wife saw, and left him that he might marry the sewing maid on whose youth he looked with lust. That feckless wench gave him a son, but left him with ruin from her extravagance and his land debauched from overlove, overambition. The farm was sold under his feet. His boy died. But in his hour of despair, his unwanted wife stepped back into his life, as at his need she had stepped out of it. Thus earnestly, persuasively speaks the sister of A. S. M. Hutchinson, of Luke Braddock, man inarticulate and passionate.