Love Preferred

THE GOOD HOPE--Henry Sydnor Harrison--Houghton Mifflin ($2).

This posthumous story by the late Henry Sydnor Harrison is more of a sermon than a novelet, may possibly help lift you to a state of grace if you are still bemoaning stockmarket losses. Author Harrison wrote so cheerfully you may like it anyway.

Typical young Bank Clerk Lawrence Renney thought he was conservative, for months kept himself from climbing aboard the late great bandwagon boom in stocks. But when he succumbed at last, everything went his way. Starting with $42,000, his paper wealth amounted to $500,000 when the crash came and cleaned him out. By then he was living expensively, bibulously, had long been fired from his bank. The morning after one last desperate party he decided to kill himself, went up to the penthouse to step over the edge. But there a girl was waiting for him. She persuaded him to go for a walk, and told him about her own troubles, which were worse than his. Her father had killed himself; her sister had died in a sanatorium for drug-addicts; her brother had gambled the remaining family fortune away and died of a broken heart; her mother had gone blind, died a few months ago. The girl looked peaked herself.

During this autobiographical walk around Manhattan one ex-friend after another met Lawrence and offered him friendly help. To cap all, the girl showed him a flourishing bookshop, offered him the job of running it. Then they were mysteriously separated and Lawrence woke up in his room. When he called her apartment he found she had died the day before; but everything else had really happened.

The Author. Death, as it must even to optimists, came to Henry Sydnor Harrison, aged 50, last July. No widow but many a friend, many a reader, mourned him. Other books: Queed, V. V.'S Eyes, Angela's Business.

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