Again, Tarkington

YOUNG MRS. GREELEY--Booth Tarkington--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

"Henry used the trolley cars to go to the factory leaving the sedan for Aurelia. Almost every morning she drove down town, left the car in a hired parking space, and walked to a department store, taking note of her reflection in all the plate glass show windows on the way. In the store she might spend an hour pricing things and perhaps matching a shred of silk, buying a pair of stockings, a small vial of perfume or a box of scented powder. Then she would hurry to keep an engagement to lunch indigestibly with Stella Greeley at a confectioner's.

"'My dear!' Aurelia would exclaim. 'I'm half dead with shopping!' Then, if it didn't happen to be one of the days for hair dressing, manicuring and facial beautifying, they would go to the movies and stay until after five. ... 'I do wish I could find time to take French or music or something!' "

Author Tarkington has often before but never more mercilessly demonstrated his knowledge of smalltown wives. In Young Mrs. Greeley he involves two of them in a minor tempest which sends one back to her native village, puts the other also in her place, all because of a cool-eyed modern who is neither wife nor smalltown. Crystal Nelson, first assistant to Cooper, the Big Boss, hears that Mr. Greeley's rapid rise in the N. K. U. (National Kitchen Utensils) is due to young Mrs. Greeley's influence with the boss. She traces the gossip to Aurelia, young Mrs. Greeley's confidante. Deftly Miss Nelson demotes Aurelia's husband to an out-of-town office, adroitly she arranges dinner for the Greeleys at Mr. Cooper's home. There a fellow guest asks Mrs. Greeley whether she prefers Bach to Stravinsky. Her coy retort, "Isn't he the high-brow cutup, though?" echoes into ghastly silence. That night she admits to her husband that his rapid rise has not been due to her.