Mr. Davies is very much in the classic tradition. The seven stories he presents [in "The Chosen One and Other Stories"] … are traditional in topic and treatment, if not in theme. Most of them deal with villagers and country people in Wales, describing in highly polished ways their tragedies and comedies. If our great-grandparents could have read them 75 years ago, they would have felt admiringly comfortable in the presence of Mr. Davies's smooth writing, his tidy ironies, his nice equilibrium of setting, plot and character, his rustic dialects, his neat denouements, many of them ending with twists or tricks. Some of the stories have real vigor, notably the title story, which is about a simple-minded Welsh workman whose genteel but demented landlady tries to seduce him by blackmail. But on the whole Mr. Davies's achievements are more technical than emotional, his characters more engaging than engrossing. The diet...