Spacious Days

With the wedding only a fortnight away, everybody was beginning to get a bit jittery. To a friend last week, Princess Elizabeth confessed that she was "already frightened at the thought of walking up the aisle." However, Elizabeth's sister Margaret, undaunted, confided that she herself means to be married before long. Palace spokesmen were quick to deny all rumors. But after an engagement party at Giro's last week, one sharp-eyed newsman was ready to swear he had seen Princess Margaret and Philip's first cousin, the 28-year-old Marquess of Milford Haven, holding hands under the table.*

Meanwhile, at several London stores, knowing purchasers of wedding gifts for Elizabeth had asked to have them monogrammed "E.E." Knowledgeable gossips immediately concluded that the Royal Family had decided on Edinburgh as a suitable dukedom for their son-in-law. More excitable gossips were aghast at a story that Lord Inverchapel, Britain's Ambassador to the U.S., had ordered from a Hollywood firm six pairs of Nylon stockings with clocks of seed pearls as his present to the Princess. In Washington the pained British Embassy promptly scotched that story.

In all likelihood Elizabeth would not have been too disappointed over the pearly Nylons. "The spacious days are gone," she told an audience at the Royal Society of Arts last week. "But we should be defeatist indeed if we concluded that, because everything we produce today must be severely practical, it must also be without taste or beauty." As gifts of everything from stuffed pillows to sewing machines piled up in St. James's Palace (TIME, Nov. 10), a young lord asked Elizabeth what she needed most: "So far," said the Princess, "we're awfully short on silver and Mummie and Daddy haven't passed any over yet."

* Philip himself no longer had to be so circumspect. At a meeting of 6,000 British Legionnaires in Albert Hall last week, he turned to his betrothed as she sat in the royal box and loudly sang: Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.