girls in a plushy Vermont college for women. It is a satisfying love for both girls and lasts for two years. It is also a satisfying love to a reader who is sick and tired of bad writing on the subject. Much nonsense about homosexuality and lesbianism is kicked out of the window by the young author in the first pages of the book and never referred to again. Love is love and her main character, Kathy, enjoys it to the hilt and gains all there is to be gained from such an experience without guilt or morbid pages of Freudian analysing.

Miss Perutz may be delicate or bawdy, hilarious or sublime as she weeds her "garden" of love, but she compels admiration and attention from her very first line: "The morning I found her dead was gray, and the toast at breakfast had been burnt". . . to the to the very last.

Sten Russell

THE COMPLETE RONALD FIRBANK by Ronald Firbank, Gerald Duckworth, London, 1961, 766 pp., $7.75.

In issuing the writings of Ronald Firbank in one volume, the publishers of The Complete Ronald Firbank have provided all of us a wonderful way of becoming acquainted or, perhaps, reacquainted with this highly special, wildly amusing author.

Firbank's "wonderland" is particularly to be appreciated in these times: the gayety and nonsense, the beauty of his fanciful kingdoms and island paradises are sheer fun, tinged with a gentle sadness. His world is a stylish world, chic, elegant, but touched with wit and imagination and presented with exquisite craftmanship. His sort of imagination is not used today, except in measuring how many megatons it would take to destroy Cucamonga. It was under the strictest

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and deftest discipline, and it is what produces grace, charm, wit, and devastation but devastation to giggle at not to wail over. Firbank's success, and the pleasure in reading him, spring from the atmosphere of pure enjoyment which he manages create. He should be approached in a spirit of tolerance; it is a mistake to expect too much: either the reader finds entertainment, even food for thought, in the Firbankian universe, or he does not. Firbank's preoccupation with society ladies, ecclesiastics, lesbians, crowned heads and beautiful negresses carrying on against a background of jewel-like, rococo kingdoms, Greek isles or Caribbean sea, will not be to everyone's taste:

Midnight had ceased chiming from the Belfry tower, and the last seguidilla had died away. Looking fresh as a rose, and incredibly juvenile in his pyjamas of silver-grey and scarlet (the racing colors of Vittoria, Duchess of Vizeu), the Cardinal seemed disinclined for bed.

Surveying in detachment the preparatives for his journey (set out beneath an El Greco Christ, with outspread, delicate hands), he was in the mood to dawdle.

"These for the Frontier. Those for the train," he exclaimed aloud, addressing a phantom porter.

Among the personalia was a passport, the likeness of identity showing him in a mitre, cute to tears, though, essentially, orthodox; a flask of Napoleon brandy, to be "declared" if not consumed before leaving the peninsula; and a novel, SELF-ESSENCE. on the Index, or about to be . . .

Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli

The Queen had a passion for motoring. She would motor for hours and hours with her crown on; it was quite impossible to mistake her ... she was

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