Miss Warner is one of that handful of English and American women writers who manage to be by turns compassionate and scathing without their syntax becoming ruffled or their taste affected by the moral climate of which they write. Less vibrant and evocative than Elizabeth Bïwen, and not such a reformer at heart as Elizabeth Parsons, the touchstone of Miss Warner's gifts seems to be her level acceptance of people as they are.

It would be difficult, indeed, to choose the best from this collection of twenty-two short stories[The Museum of Cheats]. Perhaps the title entry, which is also the longest in the book, represents her antic fantasy, shrewd commentary and silken satire at its most rounded. At any rate, the two-and-a-half centuries that she encompasses in the forty pages of "Museum of Cheats" certainly are populated by a great many of those unostentatious eccentrics, defiant clerks and strong-willed women who under this author' s skilled guidance prove to be unexpectedly entertaining.

Another mood, "Boors Carousing," is an incisive study of a self-serving author and a genteel lady tippler. There is a group of tales about agreeably demented people that manages to tell a good deal about the inner tensions and stresses of our society. This reader must openly admit to an admiring fondness for the mildly schizophrenic ex-policeman who enjoys brief fame as a "Genuine English Primitive" painter in the pages of "Story of a Patron." A real affection is also possible for vague Mrs. Finch, who, in "The House with the Lilacs," embarrasses her family by fantasying about houses she's never seen, and for Rosie Flounders' war-time adventures. Among other wisely acid tidbits is "Poor Mary," an account of an unwanted female that reminds one of rather somber Dorothy Parker, and "The Cold," which gives a self-righteous, middle-class dowager much the same treatment that Saki often accorded her more elevated sisters.