GOODBYE STRANGER. By Stella Benson. (Macmillans fs. 6d. net.)-Were a
fairy to write novels, one fancies it would write like Miss Benson, who identifies herself and her characters with the followers of Titania in some strange way. There is something uncanny, so meticulous and unexpected, about her authorship, which at once attracts and repels. Phrase and ideas here and there remind one of images conjured up by Mr. Christopher Morley and Mr. A. A. Milne, both of whom are a trifle bewitched, or of those tiny chairs which very neat- fingered children make out of horse chestnuts, pins and embroidery silks.
This is the story of a strange, solitary woman, who has a short, poignant, and perfectly unconcealed loVe affair with an English missionary in a Chinese Outpost. Clifford, the Missionary, is a sort of national who behaves with all the egotism and fantasy of . a self-appointed genius : his old pother, the cruelly but brilliantly drawn Mrs. Cotton, thinks he is a changeling and hints that is small wonder her real son, whose place has been usurped by the Clifford we know, should have run away from Daby, Clifford's American wife.
Miss Benson reserves her utmost bitterness for Daby, who is so civilized and so uneducated, so womanly and so ridiculous. She and her affairs take the most prominent place in this tale : the curicus love affair of Clifford and the other woman is comparatively as unsubstantial as a dream.
Miss Benson is sometimes pure artist ; as in her treatment of Daby. Other whiles she is a little too self-expressive, almost personal. But there is a peculiar acrid flavour, a thin remote music to everything she writes.
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