Second paragraph of third chapter:

Jim, a pipe in his teeth, leaned back against the oak pew. His eyes shifted from the game and went to Nancy, who, with her chin supported in the crutch of her two hands, was working out her next move.

This was the best selling book of 1925 in the USA, by the largely forgotten Arthur Hamilton Gibbs – it’s his best-known book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but has only 11 raters on Goodreads and only 9 owners on LibraryThing. (The Great Gatsby, also published in 1925, has been rated by getting on for six million Goodreads users, and has almost 80,000 owners on LibraryThing, as of present writing.)

It’s a coming of age story about a young Englishwoman, who goes to Paris, discovers herself, discovers love, discovers that men are both tempting and awful, and finds her destiny back in England looking after her disabled father and developing her own Art; then at the end, one of the men turns out not to have been so awful after all.

There are comic yokels / grovelling working class folk, and although the heroine at one point seems ready to break into full feminist independence, the book doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and goes for a safe ending. It is not as funny as it thinks it is, and, like its heroine, is coy rather than sexy.

It is set immediately before the war and during its first half, and perhaps the readers of 1925 liked the story it told about the time before and during the collective loss of innocence. However I can’t really construct a case for rediscovering it as a lost classic. You can get Soundings here, but NB that the text is riddled with electronic scanning errors.