GREAT BRITAIN: Ladies

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The elevator in Paris' Hotel Meurice is frivolous. It looks as much like a gondola as an elevator can. Into it one evening last week stepped two aged Britons—Neville Chamberlain and Viscount Halifax. They alighted at an upper floor and proceeded to the suite of the man who used to be their King-Emperor, now His Royal Highness, the Duke of Windsor.

The Duchess of Windsor, the thrice-married lady for whose love Edward VIII abdicated, is not Her Royal Highness. She is merely the 29th and lowest Duchess in the realm, a fact which annoys the Duke. It seems to him that the royal family's— particularly the royal ladies'—attitude toward the Duchess is needlessly punitive. He also resents the moral indignation raised against the Duchess by that class of English ladies so well represented by Lucy Baldwin, wife of the Prime Minister who pressured him off the throne. With his chin well out, the Duke was said to have introduced his lady to their visitors as "Her Royal Highness." The tall Prime Minister and the taller Foreign Secretary acknowledged, but scarcely confirmed this title with a bow. Later Paris socialites, abuzz over this first meeting since the abdication between the Duke and top-rank British officials, speculated whether the Ministers had thus tacitly recognized the royal status of the Duchess.

After 22 minutes of talk, during which the four reportedly agreed that the "exiled" Duke would return to England in January, he and his lady in March, that he might take on some governor-generalship. Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Halifax withdrew. They returned to the British Embassy where their ladies had been awaiting them.