THE SCENT OF WATER

An oddly old-fashioned novel in its major premises, this is not wholly redeemed by the author's charm and skill in writing. It is a love story in which the heroine's spiritual growth compensates her for the indubitable fact that the blind man she has come to love turns back (if he had ever turned away) to the wife he had almost lost. This pat solution aside, the story offers many ingredients that are unfailingly appealing to many sickened by the nihilism of much of today's fiction. Mary Lindsay, a successful business woman, approaching the age of retirement, inherits a house from an aunt who had captured her imagination in her childhood. In rejecting the city which had been her setting and retiring to a village in rural England, Mary Lindsay had taken a major step to self fulfillment. But it needed a rediscovery of the aunt she had barely known, of the man who had died in war before they were married, and of the importance of learning to know herself through sharing her gifts with others less well endowed, to bring Mary to complete understanding and acceptance. Children are a vital part of the story- and in her handling of children Elizabeth Coudge is, as always, at her best.