Ripple

EVA GAY--Evelyn Scott--Smith & Haas ($2.50).

Authoress Scott likes a big canvas. In Migrations and The Wave, she filled a panoramic picture of the Civil War with hundreds of figures, a meticulously colorful background. A Calendar of Sin made No. 3 of her U. S. historical series. Eva Gay is not quite so big (only 799 pages), but its figures are few, its background so subdued that attention is glaringly focused on the three main characters. Many a wearied reader will not be attentive to the bitter end.

Eva Gay was a small-town only child, brought up in the late 19th Century tradition of fearing God, honoring her parents, seeing, doing, knowing no evil. But Eva wanted to know what it was all about, wanted to be something better than a carefully cultivated small-town girl. She dabbled in books, woman's suffrage, radicalism ; when the War gave her the chance she went to France as a nurse. Meanwhile Hans Haaska, Missouri doctor's son, was finding his painful way through priggishness to virtue. In England he was doing well in biology when his sister's death called him home. There he married an older woman, narrow, Fundamentalist, and together they went to Africa to physic the heathen. But his marriage went to smash on the Rock of Ages. When he met a second-rate singer who flattered him, though a child could have told him not to take a chance, he did, with disastrous results. Disillusioned, middle-aged but still far from sophisticated, Dr. Haaska met Nurse Gay in the army. They hit it off well till Artist Evan happened along; then they all had a bad time. Of the three, aging Dr. Haaska came off best.

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