Again, Arlen

LILY CHRISTINE--The Story of a Good Woman--Michael Arlen--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

On Lily Christine's pink and black jacket is a subtitle mentioning good woman; on her title page in pink fast deflowering to purple she nevertheless promises "a romance." This for Michael Arlen of the onetime vogue is an amalgam so incongruous that one can but suspect him of a publicity trick. The suspicion is confirmed by the old sophisticated sentimentalities of style ill-matched to a heroine, beautiful though near-sighted and bespectacled, passionately devoted to her children though they visit the pages but once, loyal to a faithless husband though she begs one of her many admirers to elope with her. Because she loved him, Lily Christine had married a smart model of English manhood, penniless gambler, cricketer, master of many mistresses. Lily Christine ignored these "pieces of nonsense," supplied her "old carthorse" husband with a constant friendship, and held the family together.

Then suddenly she was confronted, not by a "piece of nonsense" but by an actress whose virtue was a British household word --a thoroughly wicked woman, grist to the Arlenesque mill. This crafty villainess bewitches the carthorse into cad, and breaks Lily Christine's heart. Not the least of the heroine's anguish is over a respectable middle-class boyfriend whom she has unwittingly involved in the scandal. And just as the plot is thickening pleasantly, Lily Christine's creator pitches her under the wheels of a motor-lorry.