“THE WAY THINGS ARE”

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 139, 26 May 1928, Page 9

“THE WAY THINGS ARE”

By

E. M. Delafield.

{Harper. New York.) The motto printed on the fly-leaf of this very human story is taken from “The Diary of a Nobody,” and is as follows:—“I left the room with silent dignity, but caught mj foot on the mat.’J Philosophers have often told us that when we do things contrary to nature —and it may be counted to a man for righteousness if he regards standing on one’s dignity as a breach of the natural law —nature will retaliate by rapping the wrongdoer over the fingers. So Laura Temple the chief character in this story, found it to be. By a brilliant effort of characterisation. the author has managed to depict a woman who is so intimately like scores of women we know, that the book fastens a tremendous grip on the reader’s attention. Her husband ig a plain, unimaginative, matter-of-fact " country farmer, content to jog along in a strictly limited routine in company of his wife and their two little boys. Laura is of different stuff, having in her a streak of romance. (Yes. You see it coming all right. But the story is so splendidly told that you must follow it through to see when the motto on the flyleaf will take effect.) Laura sought to “realise herself” by writing occasional short stories. In this enterprise she was the only member of the family who was at all interested. There followed inevitably that bottled-up feeling, that craving for sympathetic appreciation. that sense of beating against the bars of a cage, that—well, that familiar feeling that you who read these lines know all about. He turned up of course. And instead of lying awake at nights and cogitating as to the best methods of making puddings out of the same old ingredients so that they would look and taste like new discoveries, Laura was able to find an audience in her husband’s friend, to whom she was able to speak of herself as she wanted herself to be spoken about. But the mat tripped her up, even on the point of her exit from her family responsibilities, and while the wide fields and new pastures beckoned her the claims of her prosaic husband and her children were stronger still. So she smoothed down the ruffled mat. let her dignity slide, and sat down again by the domestic hearth wiser and. so far as one can see. not sadder. It is a book for those who rail at circumstance, and Hamlet’s dictum ig borne out bv it, that ’tig better to bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.