Books: Gallant Davey

COCK'S FEATHER — Katharine Newlin Burt—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Nobody would have believed that Davey "play-acted" a gallant knight outnumbered and surrounded by ruffians, but Sophie of the flaming red pigtails had caught him at it, and all her life she tried to reconcile that adventurous romantic spirit with the David, right hand man at the bank, David, beloved servant of the community, David, matter-of-course slave to his relatives. "Perhaps Davey will see his way clear to ..." send a bespectacled niece to finishing school, house a carping old-maid cousin, finance the whims and mistresses of a charming but debauched artist brother. Sophie married Davey out of her need for him, but the omnipresence of his relatives drove her to a garish New York apartment, complete with lovelorn poets, exaggerated cigaret holders, and the Nietzschean superman who mightily desired her. Outnumbered and surrounded, David wins in the end.

For years Mrs. Struthers Burt paid the grocer, sent the children to school, on the proceeds of blood-and-thunder bestsellers, while her more distinguished husband wrote literature. Recently his literature has begun to pay, and his wife has snatched the opportunity herself to indulge in a little literature. As such, Cock's Feather is carefully designed, well-written. Never attaining heights of imagination or depths of tragedy, it is the consistent story of remarkably convincing human characters.