Medicine Man

THE DOCTOR--Mary Roberts Rinehart --Farrar & Rinehart ($2).

When Mary Roberts Rinehart's 50th book came out last week, hardly a critic raised his head. But for readers who like to settle comfortably in bed with a nice warm-hearted story, Author Rinehart had once more supplied just the thing. To an uncritical eye The Doctor is a hearty moral tale that shades almost imperceptibly away from real life. Mary Roberts Rinehart has more than a nodding acquaintance with most of the people she writes about, and by the standards of her school her sympathies are keen. To those who mistake the itch and ache of sentimentality for the cathartic stir of tragedy, The Doctor may prove a pleasantly laxative experience.

Noel ("Chris") Arden was a big, heavy- shouldered young man with a capable pair of surgeon's hands and three years' interneship behind him. When he set up practice for himself, waited for patients to come, it seemed a long wait. The family in whose house he boarded and had his office were a no-account lot. Beverly, pretty heiress of the town's tycoon, brought Chris his first patient--her dog. She and Chris quarrelled and fell in love immediately. Chris was too proud and poor to do anything about it, but Beverly wangled him the job of city doctor. When he got an appointment as surgeon at the hospital he had his hands full. Women found him attractive. Katie, his landlady's slatternly but provocative daughter, had a particularly shameless desire for him, was always underfoot till he sent her off to be a trained nurse.

Things seemed to be breaking right for Chris till he had a row with Beverly's father, then a row with Beverly. She went abroad, got herself engaged to the wrong man. After her marriage Chris tried to drown himself in work. He went abroad for a few months' study in Vienna, marrying Katie and taking her along, not because he wanted her but because she nagged him into it. She soon got tired of him, and he was glad to leave her for the War. Back home again, he became a hardworking, successful surgeon, an aging Spartan boy with a greying fox in his bosom. When an accident ruined his right arm, Katie left him. Meantime Beverly's wrong husband had died, so at last their tragicomedy of errors came to a rhymed conclusion.

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