MRS. GAILEY

Story of a lady-on-the-make who wins the hand and loses the game when her plot to foll Mrs. Winrow of the Manor who called her ""a person"" provides a different ending from the one she planned. Mrs. Galley, gutter-bred, with a thin veneer of polish, is the new secretary engaged by Mrs. Winrow's eccentric daughter, Leslie, who flaunts her hatred of the class to which she was born by doing all sorts of erratic things. Mrs. Gailey thought that nothing would pierce the armor of the lady of the manor more completely than mating Leslie with an up and coming young tenant farmer, of a class Mrs. Winrow felt beneath her notice, despite his Majority in the army of World War II. But she reckoned without Charlie Vine, to whom marriage with Leslie would have seemed a barrier to his ambitions rather than an aid. That Leslie's heart was broken -- her suit rejected- did not enter Mrs. Gailey's calculations. The finale was fairly obvious and mechanical, and the story leaves an end impression of a somewhat static battle of the classes set in a vacuum of an England Sheila Kaye- Smith has made her own.