Elizabeth's Autumn Garden

MR. SKEFFINGTON -- Elizabeth--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Like Hemingway's definition of guts ("grace under pressure"), the true test of urbanity is staying power. By that test, "Elizabeth" is one of civilization's minor triumphs. For readers of her 20th novel, Mr. Skeffington, will find themselves firmly taken in by the same diverting, lightly troubling, perfectly delicate and occasionally outrageous wit that distinguished Elizabeth and Her German Garden 42 years ago and The Enchanted April 24 years later.

Lady Frances Skeffington, to whom the reader is introduced in her rose-colored bedroom on a foggy February morning, has been one of the great, the exquisite beauties of England. Her 20th birthday is now less than a month away. Totally unprepared to face this event, she has had brutal warning of it in the fact that her lovely hair is rapidly falling out. Worse, she keeps seeing Job.

Job was the very rich Mr. Skeffington whom Lady Fanny married before 1914, whom she divorced at 28 after his seventh infidelity, and to whose still worshipful settlement she owed 22 years of delicious freedom. Since her illness last autumn, Fanny has found his apparition continually turning up, especially at breakfast. After crying over her grapefruit, Fanny decides this morning to consult a Harley Street specialist, Sir Stilton Byles.

A rude shock is Sir Stilton Byles. In stead of expensive sympathy, Lady Fanny gets from him one stinging slap after an other, including the flat statement that her "love-days" are over. As for the spectre of Mr. Skeffington, "Lay him," says Sir Stilton. "If he haunts you, he must be laid. . . . Make friends with Job. See him often. Ask him to dinner. Lay him, in fact."

So angry that for several hours she feels young again, Fanny sails off to Oxford to reassure herself with a Rhodes Scholar who is (or was) her latest adorer. She finds him on a secluded garden bench, given over to love with a pretty girl.

Ruefully, hopefully, Fanny makes a pilgrimage among the most distinguished of her former lovers, discovers that whether hardened, dried or dimmed with age they all look at her in the same way. The stabbing malice with which Novelist Elizabeth portrays these gentlemen, the skill with which she leads fragile Fanny to put away vanity and resort to wisdom, her airy invention of incident put Mr. Skeffington in the class of favorite novels for women. Few readers will lay it down until Mr. Skeffington is finally laid -- and the meaning of his first name incidentally unfolded.

The lady known as Elizabeth is now an old lady of 74. Born Mary Annette Beauchamp (pronounced Beecham), a cousin of the late Katherine Mansfield (Kathleen Beauchamp), she was married first to a German nobleman, Count von Arnim, and in 1916 to the second Earl Russell, elder brother of Philosopher Bertrand Russell. After their separation a few years later, she lived and worked in Switzerland, England and France. Last summer she left her villa in the south of France, turned up at the Dublin Inn, Dublin, N. H. In the autumn, driving her own small car, she proceeded to the Gold Eagle Tavern at Beaufort (pronounced Bufert), S. C. There last week she and her cocker spaniel, Billy, savored the spring.

Tiny (5 ft.), grey-eyed, sprightly, the Countess Russell in her dining-out days was called by Alice Meynell one of the three finest living wits. She enjoys most being by herself. Her record in remaining uninterviewed (until 1926) is admired by connoisseurs. She is already halfway through her next book, of which she will say nothing even to her publishers. The fuss about her brother-in-law Bertrand (TIME, April 8) interests and puzzles her. She says his morals are all right. "He's been married several times, but then, so have a lot of Americans."

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