Nurse and Love

NURSE ADRIANE--Norah C. James-- Covici, Friede ($2.50).

The late Enoch Arnold Bennett, with his appetite for facts-of-modern-life, would have enjoyed this book. Nurse Adriane is a love story, but its setting, a big London hospital, is what will hold any Bennett-like reader. Against this fact-laden background almost any story would do. Authoress James writes her straightforward narrative in straightforward London (as opposed to Oxford) English; though her cases are emotional she deals with them like a competent surgeon--cutting neatly to the essential, never faltering into sloppiness.

Adriane had served her long, hard novitiate as a probationer and a nurse; now she was a "sister" at South's Hospital, in charge of a men's ward. Capable though pretty, she never let anything come between her job and her. But her fiance. Jerry, had begun to worry her. Jerry's mother was a mean, sly old woman who did her best to break up the engagement; Adriane saw through her but Jerry could not. As a last gambling expedient Adriane lured Jerry away for a weekend with her; when he left her flat in answer to his mother's fretful telegram, she knew she had lost. But when Bernard, a gentleman racing driver and an old patient of Adriane's, turned up as a casualty in her ward, she began to feel less sorry for herself.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.