More Mothers

DEBONAIR--G. B. Stern--Knopf ($2.50). Twittering, dove-colored, Mrs. Trevelyan welcomes her daughter, Loveday, back to their little haven on the Italian Riviera, and would so gladly "forgive and forget" if only she would confide.

"Loveday--?"

"Oh no, Mummy, it isn't that! Poor darling, were you afraid I was going to spring a little bastard on you?"

Not Loveday--such was not her "lay." As she explained to a friend (not her mother, who would never have understood), "I'm not a humbug; . . . I say all open and sunny: What I really want is for you to give me a good time. ... In return I'll keep company with you!--literally. . . . They can judge, then, if my company's worth it. What's to prevent them running? . . . It's the same high seas and black flag for us all."

So Loveday buccaneered through garish London night life, dipped her black flag to Charles--"formal, formidable, fastidious," to which descriptive f's Loveday later added "fatuous, fulsome," because of his devotion to a silly mother, self-styled "Petal." Bankrupt, Pirate Loveday shipped for foreign parts as partner to a professional dancer. In Budapest he attempted his own interpretation of "keeping company," but Loveday "whooshed"' off to London, on the "wadge" of kronen which a Hungarian tart pulled generously out of her stocking.

Eventually she reached the Riviera, and played white-clad jeune fille to a smugly relieved mother, who basked then for weeks in the compliments the world paid her upon her daughter. Lest Mrs. Trevelyan's serenity be disturbed by the discovery of unaccountable Balkan visas on Loveday's passport, the girl blithely burns it. Just at the wrong time, however, for Loveday hears of Petal's remarriage, and instinctively recognizes that Charles, released from the bondage of maternal adoration, would yield to his Debonair if only she were at hand. How to get to England? A convenient husband is traveling home alone, with a Victorian man-and-wife passport. Loveday persuades him to let her impersonate the better half of the joint document, but Italian border officials find her far too beautiful for the alleged likeness, even with allowances for its being a passport picture. Loveday is detained in disgrace, only to be accused by the pictured wife of eloping with her Victorian husband.

At last there is an end to adversity, and they all live happily ever afterward--even Mrs. Trevelyan, relieved, once her daughter is safely married, of the necessity of posing to herself and to the world as the chosen confidante and sponsor of so disturbingly modern a daughter.

In contrast to her earlier saga of the Jewish Matriarch's passionate assumption of power, Author Stern now tells the story of an Anglo-Saxon mother's fluttering desire, not for power, but for filial devotion, which is doled out to her spasmodically, and none too generously by a generation impatient of self-sacrifice. With wit and wisdom Miss Stern divides her sympathies, but indulges of course the side of radiant, reckless youth.