WOMEN: Monkey!

A Britisher in a blue suit and a wide-brimmed panama hat tore screaming along the ship’s rail— leapt, climbed, jostled dignified bankers, evaded pursuit. “Mon-key!” “Monkey!” screamed passengers. “MONKEY!” The Hon. John Jacob Astor ran to his mother, clambered into her lap. He is aged seven. Last week photographers snapped busily Lady Nancy Astor, onetime Virginia beauty, first woman member of the British Parliament, here on her second U. S. visit. She was “traveling incognito,” she said, looking admiringly at her 17-year-old Phyllis, who did look well. Michael, aged ten, shuffled against the Hon. John Jacob, against quiet David, 15, a bit self-conscious in his natty new long pants. “Smile, Jakey,” said Lady Astor. Reporters quizzed. She answered graciously: No, Phyllis did not drink. Yes, the English liked Will Rogers. No, she was not going to bring Phyllis up as a typical girl. She loathed typical people, despised 100-percenters of any nationality. Yes, she liked the modern girl. No, she was no Socialist; she was a social reformer. Yes, the English are wonderful in a crisis. No, she would tell them nothing about the annexation of Canada; she knew nothing. Yes, she was going up to Maine with her brother-in-law, Charles Dana Gibson. No. . . . Yes. . . . No. . . . The U. S. public votes for its “Ma” Fergusons, its W. C. T. U. reformers, its crow-voiced, flat-heeled “careerists,” then gazes sheepishly, enviously, abroad to this woman twice ennobled—once by Virginia birth, again by British marriage—awards her the respect invariably awarded by democracy to true aristocracy.