A Cry of Children
by . Harper,$3.00.
In his third novel, as in Lucifer with a Book, Mr. Burns does not live up to the promise of his first, The Gallery, one of the best works of fiction about the last war. Burns tells the story of a gifted, coddled young concert pianist, who breaks away from his mother and sets up housekeeping with a tramp called Isobel. He soon finds himself in the harrowing predicament of being physically enraptured with Isobel and thinking himself in love with her, while recognizing that they have nothing at all in common, and that he is sickened by her disheveled mores and the messiness of her Bohemian playmates. A Cry of Children is moderately humorous in places; but novelists have worked over this particular situation pretty extensively, and I failed to find anything particularly fresh or stirring about Burns’s treatment of it.