Matter of Taste

Matter of Taste

A GIRL ADORING -- Viola Meynell -- Dutton ($2.50). Viola Meynell borrows the delicate pastels of spring flowers to enhance the loveliness of Claire, a young girl adoring. For all her wax-figure delicacy Claire breathes, gently, and harbors surprisingly virile passions. She does not like, she adores, Laura, the sister-in-law with whom she lives, and protects her with passionate devotion from the smug mediocrity of her gentleman-farmer husband. His shortcomings are only too blatant for his sensitive sister Claire, but not for Laura, a duly admiring wife. When Claire discovers the needlessness of so deftly protecting Laura, she turns to another sister-in-law, widowed by suicide. She hopes somehow to atone for the abuse beautiful Louise had suffered at the hands of her other brother. The atonement includes sacrificing the man Claire worships with a terrifying first love-- Hague, whom Louise endeavors to ensnare with her ripe allure. But neither of them had reckoned with Hague's mature distaste for decadence, or with his vigorous taste for pastels. "Civilization" requires that sentimentality be curbed by humor, strong passion camouflaged by casual words. Author Meynell's is a civilized novel. The story of Claire's unselfishness is not cluttered with realistic details concerning Louise's husband who "had drifted into a discreditable way of life," Louise herself who "made all men feel a little virtuous who kept their eyes off her," and Hague whose early life had known many lands and many women. No doubt the accepted method would consider this data essential to "atmosphere," but Viola Meynell holds to an earlier tradition of beauty. For she is daughter of the late Alice Meynell, poet and essayist.