GREAT BRITAIN: The Crown: Sep. 24, 1934

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When a little girl gave chase to the royal limousine, panting after it with a fistful of flowers. Prince George told the chauffeur to pull up and the child with a breathless curtsy plumped her posies into Princess Marina's lap. At Prince George's apartments in St. James's Palace, the Princess and her parents spent an hour, then left with him for Balmoral Castle. As yet Marina had no engagement ring, since George had found nothing suitable in the Balkans where he wooed her (TIME. Sept. 10). Last week His Royal Highness ordered in London a superb Kashmir sapphire, supported by two oblong diamonds in a platinum setting. ¶ When Scottish journalists dryly observed that Prince George is in fact a commoner, the usual flurry ensued as Englishmen turned to their Encyclopedia Britannica and once more were titillated by this technicality: "The children of the Sovereign, other than his eldest son, though by courtesy 'princes' and 'princesses,' need a royal warrant to raise them de jure above the common herd; and even then, though they be dubbed 'Royal Highness' in their cradles, they remain 'commoners' till raised to the peerage."

At Balmoral Castle last week it was considered certain that King George will raise Commoner George to the peerage before he marries Princess Marina, probably making him Duke of Edinburgh.

¶ Such fun was Edward of Wales having at Cannes last week with beauteous Mrs. Wallace Wakefield Simpson that he sent back to Marseilles an airplane he had ordered over to take him up to Paris.

"To the delight of hundreds of onlookers last night." cabled a British correspondent, "the Prince danced the rumba with an American woman identified as a Mrs. Simpson."

She became THE Mrs. Simpson last month at Biarritz where His Royal Highness welcomed her as she arrived, carried her suitcase out of the railway coach.