Such a character as _Miss
Jessie_, who goes about doing good, and producing incidentally the
most benevolent reactions in confirmed misanthropes, demands to be
handled with the nicest care if sentimentality is to be avoided. Let
me put it that Miss TURNBULL has not always been entirely successful
in this respect. Thus, despite some agreeable scenes, the book remains
one for the unsophisticated, or for those whose appetite for fictional
glucose is robust. There is not very much that can be called plot;
what there is concerns itself with the fortunes of _Miss Jessie's_
tenants, the chief objects of her ministrations. In the end an
air-raid, of which the details are surely unusual, provides _Miss
Jessie_ with the opportunity for a deed of heroism that I am still
trying to visualize (her nephew had thrown her down and was protecting
her body with his own; but the heroine, seeing this, changed places
with her defender "between the flash of the shell's impact and the
explosion") and finishes, with an appropriately tearful death-scene, a
tale that would have been improved by more restraint in the telling.
Pages:
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81