"Well, Well!"

Chuckles were heard in tens of thousands of British homes when the famed London weekly Sketch arrived and was ruffled over to a peculiarly English full page cartoon in decorous pastel colors.

Depicted was a sophisticated bookshop into which an innocent, pink-cheeked old lady had blundered, on her Christmas shopping. The caption--irresistibly amusing to Britons, but puzzling to many a U. S. citizen--read:

WELL, WELL!

Dear Old lady (to assistant in a bookshop) : "Have you got this Book on Loneliness by Mr. Wells?"

Of course famed and lovable H. G. Wells has not written any "Book on Loneliness." The jest went deeper than that. Its sly allusion--perfectly understood by almost every Briton, except innocent old ladies--was to a new and sensationally suppressed novel, The Well of Loneliness, by Miss Radclyffe Hall.

Miss Hall has depicted sympathetically the mutual loneliness of two women; and told frankly how they appeased it in the classic fashion set by Ancient Grecian maidens on the historic Isle of Lesbos. This same theme was hymned by Sappho, universally esteemed by classicists as the greatest poetess who ever lived. To a London policeman or magistrate, however, the very words "Lesbianism" or "Sapphism" are unmentionable, vile.

Last week Miss Hall's publishers--the old and distinguished firm of Jonathan Cape, Ltd.--appealed against suppression of The Well of Loneliness, before the Attorney General of Great Britain, Sir Thomas Inskip. National interest focused on the appeal because Miss Hall's book had received the indorsement of a petition to the Attorney General signed by John Drinkwater, Hugh Walpole, John Middleton Murray, Lytton Strachey, Arnold Bennett. . . .

Apparently the prosecution had been able to find only one distinguished Man of Letters who thought that The Well of Loneliness should be suppressed--Rudyard Kipling.

After hearing the appeal, Sir Thomas Inskip ruled, in effect, that British police shall pounce upon, confiscate and destroy all unsold copies of The Well of Loneliness. Said Sir Thomas, hotly, to reporters: "I consider this the most subtle, demoralizing, corrosive and corruptive book ever written!"

Authoress Radclyffe Hall has said: "I have studied abnormal psychology for 13 years, as a member of the Council for the Society for Psychical Research, and as a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. Those who read my book need not be told that there is nothing salacious in it, and that it is written very gravely and without offense. . . . When I speak of female inverts I do not mean perverts. . . . Many times the invert is a great artist, highly sensitive and intelligent. She would contribute much to society if she were not despised and abused."

Throughout the U. S., officials are permitting copies of The Well of Loneliness to be freely sold by Messrs. Covici-Friede of Manhattan.