Super-house

WHEN I GROW RICH -- Ethel Sidgwick -- Harpers ($2.50).

Occasionally the name of Author Sidgwick is mentioned in this country, only to be vaguely connected with the best-selling novelist Sedgwick (with an "e"), and dismissed. Some few, however, cherish an entire shelf of first editions by her with an "i," thus reflecting the wide popularity Mrs. Sidgwick holds in England. Closely related to the Bensons (A. C. and E. F.), she belongs to a literary tradition of quiet humor, leisurely manner (461 close-packed pages to the present volume, the average modern novel boasting some leaded 300). Her particular knack is to vivify a biggish assortment of characters in their intricate interchange of much talk and suppressed British emotion.

The "super-house" of When I Grow Rich is a glorified boarding house in Bloomsbury run by eight young, and mostly struggling, artists, doctors, and unclassified. Each lays claim to one charm or another, but queen of them all is Auburn whose frankness, not to mention beauty, intensely endears her to at least two of the boarders -- one of them idle-rich, and pathetically eager to be of small services; the other poor, but Scotch and ambitious. The triangle is pulled awry by the affairs of the house -- one boarder blackballs another to conceal a theft and a clandestine love affair. But it all, of course, turns out nicely in the end.