Maid

MAIDS AND MISTRESSES--Beatrice Kean Seymour--Knopf ($2.50).

Making several novels out of what is rightly one is a common enough literary device, but giving readers several novels in the dress of one is good measure, tramped down and running over. Such generosity Authoress Seymour here accords her readers. By the simple expedient of making her central character sympathetic and true she keeps the story from splitting wide apart. Her education in life (particularly sex) constitutes the story, in lots of episodes.

The sex motif makes its appearance at the beginning of Sally Dunn's life. She is an illegitimate child born into a plain English family who cannot understand how such things can rightly be. Innocent as the day herself, Sally is farmed out as a maid-of-all-work in the Yorke family. Sally loves her employers, thinks them perfection until gossip below stairs and her own observations make it clear that they have troubles undreamed of by her. Mrs. Yorke lets her husband love her only for babies' sake; Mr. Yorke wants to love her for her own. The trouble thickens. Mr. Yorke takes to drink, then to infidelity, then to his heels. Sally, an innocent amazed spectator, finds herself looking for another place.

At the home of Sanchia Hanson, who had once been Mr. Yorke's mistress, the sexual situation is reversed. Sanchia's husband had been unmanned in the War. Though she loves him, she is physically infatuated with Adrian Lorimer. When her husband finds out, he commits suicide. Sally, more learned if no wiser, passes on.

At last she gets almost bogged down in love herself. At the wealthy Stawell's her prettiness and simplicity catch Colin's eye. But for a snooping butler Colin would have made her his. Sally, very much in love, is promptly dismissed. Colin just as promptly forgets. But in her next position Sally, after a mourning while, forgets too; because in John Saril's household she finally graduates from maid to mistress. Middleaged, morose John Saril gives Sally real love, intends to marry her, make her his heir. But Death suddenly intervenes, and Sally must wander on again. In love, as in her maid's life, there is no resting place.

The Author. Authoress Seymour spent her British childhood in a strict Nonconformist atmosphere in which theatres and dancing were taboo. Unrestricted reading, however, left a loophole for Satan. After three years of co-educational schooling she made a living doing secretarial work, studying literature meanwhile under Sir Israel Gollancz at King's College. Married to a poet, poetically inclined herself, she started novel writing when her husband was off in the Air Force during the War. Almost a dozen novels followed, of which four have already been published in the U. S.: Three Wives, Youth Rides Out, False Spring, But Not For Love.

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