All the Royalties are there now and the gossip writers slop over with descriptions of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mergaret decorating their room with holly and Christmas cards, making every visitor pull a cracker, and having their own "Brownie" dul! to keep themselves up to the mark for the troop they belong to in London. Then, of course, there is the menu of the Christmas dinner to be eaten at 130 so that the Princesses and Prince Edward may take part; and the 20 foot high Christmas tree; and the presents for all the servants end tenants of Sandringham. And a tenants' ball, and the King and Queen dancing the Lambeth Walk as they did at Balmoral How do the gossips find out all this amd does the narration of it make us feel more loyal? The other day when conversation turned on the awful majesty of Queen Victoria, I heard a girl say that "if that old lady were clive now, shed get the hira every time she went out." I don't believe. it. Of course it is almost impossible to imagine Queen Victoria under present conditions, the regal aloofness of her attitude to life, that delicious note pencilled on the programme of her journey to Scotland, "When you refer to the Duchess of Fife you sheld say 'Her Royal Highness,' to show that she is not a common duchess," the precise division of rank and class, the frigid insistence on things that aren't done.
Yet in their heart English people rather like being kept in their places by those who, they feel, have a right to lord it. Majesty is all the better for being majestic. I have heard more than one person say that Edward VIII would never really have succeeded as King, that he was too unconventional and played up to the people too much. A touch of the discipline which exuded from Queen Victoria like. fog from the Essex flats would do us all no harm.
Duchess Defeated ey are quite proud.
The little girl is a spinal case.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.