AFRAID TO MARRY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 55, 6 March 1937, Page 27

AFRAID TO MARRY

"I Am. The Fox" is an American story which, except for one most curious blemish, is exceedingly well done. A girl is shy of engaging herself to be married. She believes that she is always being hunted, and that for her marriage and death are strangely interrelated. The young man has taken her to see his parents, and is endeavouring to bring her to reason. They talk (in italics), and their talk is in the stilted style of melodrama. But it is, fortunately, interrupted many times by episodes in her past life explanatory of her feelings, and these make the book.

. Selma Temple's experiences, indeed, before her meeting with Gardner Heath, are set forth in a manner which is at once gracious and sympathetic. Sqme of these, are pathetic and even rather horrible, but others are lively enough. She sees death in the schoolroom, and the shock is lasting. She meets more than one man whose behaviour is hardly calculated to banish her morbid feelings. Yet the book must not be called gloomy, for- it includes the richly comic episode of the music-mistress and the diverting affair of the amorous" Vincent. And one's only 'wonder is that Miss Van Etten, who can paint so shrewd and unexaggerated a portrait and make her people talk 4 in so natural a way should have permitted herself to include the entirely unreal conversations between Selma arid Heath. Her book, however, is well worth reading.