Modern Martyr

RACHEL MOON -- Lorna Rea -- Harper ($2.50).

Rachel Moon was an extremist, and might have been a doting wife or a Left-Wing mother. As it was -- She was at school in Switzerland when her father telegraphed her about her mother's serious illness. She found her mother paralyzed, unconscious, her face so twisted she was almost unrecognizable. Rachel's elder sister was married, almost an invalid herself; her younger sister Per-dita was terrified of sickness, and would not even go in her mother's room. So Rachel had to manage things. She went at it as if she were leading the charge of the Light Brigade. She not only kept house but helped nurse her mother, worried about her day & night. She finally got a complex on the subject and used to talk to her unconscious mother when they were alone. When the rest of them prevailed on Rachel to take a vacation she thought it almost sinful to leave her post, but when she got to her cousin's seaside cottage, among boys & girls her own age, she forgot her Mission and had a good time. Clive, poor but brilliant embryo-scientist, fell in love with her immediately, swept her off her feet. But their engagement grew longer & longer. When he got a flatteringly good job in Zurich Clive wanted Rachel to marry him and go there, but she refused to leave her mother, broke off the engagement. When he married Perdita instead, Rachel thought she could not stand it, but soon found her Mission made up for everything. As it must to all men & women, Death came at last to the unconscious hulk of her mother. Then Rachel was out of a job, but she soon found another and settled down for life as a professional martyr.

The Author. Lorna Rea (Mrs. Philip Russel Rea) wrote "passionately romantic" short stories as a child. At Cambridge, England, she studied under "Q" (Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch); the War sidetracked her to medicine; marriage sidetracked that. When her husband was ordered to Switzerland for his health, she took her two children along, decided to start writing again. Her first book was Six Mrs. Greenes.

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