Cultivated Garden

THE WORLD OVER--Edith Wharton--Appleton-Century ($2).

Like so many neat flowerbeds, the 43 books of Edith Wharton stand in polite rows that many a ruder gardener of words might envy. Few society women have gone in for such a messy job as professional writing, but even in working dress Edith Wharton is patently grande-dame. To the eyes of the younger generation, her polite and cultivated formality might well seem quaintly behind the times, but for survivors of the pre-War garden age she still has a nostalgic charm. If the stories in her latest book are not quite so cosmopolitan as the title suggests, nor her characters' quite so lifelike as they proclaim themselves, they show that Author Wharton's eye for formal effect has lost none of its cultivated keenness.

P: An antlike Manhattan broker finds his Russian wife's family a strangely charming incubus; upset and then educated by their grasshopper example, he discovers how much he loves his wife.

P: A young wife, lately married to a widower, finds that the dead hand of her predecessor will not let him alone, even writes him threatening letters.

P: Two widows, staying with their grown daughters in Rome, indulge in reminiscent chat. The brilliant, condescending one is left speechless at the news that the quiet one's envied daughter is also her husband's.

P: An unconsidered poor relation attains family importance by outliving all her generation, and on her 100th birthday behaves like nobody's business.

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