WOMAN, HER PLACE

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 23, 28 January 1928, Page 21

WOMAN, HER PLACE

"Tho Up-grade." By George Gibbs. New York and London: D. Appleton (through Dymock's, Sydney). This is an American novel with a purpose, and that purpose is to show women her place—and what sho loses by not keeping it. Emmy Jane Boroman was married to a decent enough and ordinary sort of man, established in a small cycle and motor business. He lacked initiative of push, and for his part was quite content to jog along in the small town of Trent Palls, going to and from his homo at Windsor over tho river with monotonous regularity. His wife felt crashed by this prospect of hand-to-mouth, year in, year out. There were no children, nothing at all to bind her down to domesticity, except making home comfortable for her husband. She, too, had brains and ideas and ambitions, and determined to use them. With the assistance of a local banker, she set up business on her own account, beginning with a motorlorry used in express carriage of goods from factory door between Philadelphia and New York. The one lorry quickly developed into a ileefc of high-power-ed freight carriers, and a business returning handsome profits. Emmy Jane was' its originator and manager, and her husband nominally a partner, in reality feeling himself but an inc-h or two above a hired man. She concentrated on the business; he worked like a nigger. But Emmy Jane could not have her cake and eat it, too. She was a good woman, and meant well, but was loth to believe that her commanding position in the business and the time she paid to it unfitted her as a wife, even to a husband her inferior in so many respects. Of course, the pair became estranged, and the husband plays as strenuously as he works, frequents drink parties, and companies there with girla who drink —for the time is the present. A crisis is reached when he is arrested in a police raid, and is intensified when he has a motor accident. Then, and not till then, does Emmy Jane realise that a woman cannot have her cake and eat it too. The story is well told, there is not a single improbability in it,.all the characters appear to be drawn from life, and it proves Georgo Gibbs to be a sound literary craftsman, whose work, if tho "Up-grade" be taken as an example, can be thoroughly recommended to those readers who are surfeited with so much of the fiction, American and English, that to-day succeeds in finding a public and a publisher.