Most interesting to minds of a radical turn should be the course of the legal controversy as to whose tender wing shall harbor the person of little ten-year old Gloria Vanderbilt until she comes of age, that of Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney or that of Mrs. Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt. After some weeks of tedious briefs, replications, rejoinders, evidence from the kitchen, and random scurrility, the Supreme Court has closed its cars to further discourse concerning the whimsies of the elite. Justice Carew, a modern Solomon as it were, assured the public Wednesday that the child ". . . is not to have for the future the life that it had from the death of its father up till June, 1932." Thursday the bench found it necessary to clarify this rather vague bit of rectification. The gilded arripling will by her own preference remain under the aegis of Mrs. Whitney for the present, but the court means eventually to turn her over to Mrs. Vanderbilt, as soon as the latter has arranged to provide a life in which she will be "assured of happiness." Justice Carew, ostensibly not at all anxious to terminate his connection with the notorious affair, will say when.

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Although somewhat ambitious and costly to the state, this extension of the Supreme Court's judicial prerogative into the realm of juvenile felicity should be encouraged as a promising step. The science of child welfare is a new one. There will come a day, perhaps, when the fatherly hand of the justices shall have penetrated even into the dreary tenement wastes and little Oliver Twist, in starched collar and sailor-suit, will be read "Alice in Wonderland" by judicial mandate.