"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

To aid the convalescence of Novelist Arnold Bennett, critically weakened by a six-week siege of influenza, straw was laid down and traffic thinned in the London streets near his home.

Gytha Stourton, great-granddaughter of the 19th Baron Stourton and cousin of former British Ambassador Esme William Howard, First Baron Howard of Penrith, sailed to rejoin her fiance, Signer Fiorbanti del Agnese, onetime butler at the British Embassy in Washington. Last summer her father sternly and conclusively told London reporters that any engagement between her and well-born but indigent Signer Fiorbanti del Agnese was "impossible and absurd."

Aaron Reuben, famed Manhattan sandwichman, sold his oldtime restaurant on upper Broadway ("Reuben's--That's All") but pledged himself to continue his establishment, still popular after midnight, on Madison Avenue; his Philadelphia restaurant on South Broad Street.

The hard-driven pony of Poloist H, W, ("Rube") Williams (international squad) stumbled against the boundary boards of a San Mateo, Calif, polo field, leaped clean through a crowded spectators' box, felled one man in transit, crashed into two parked autos. Poloist Williams hurt his knee, got cut up.

Miss Marjorie Durant, daughter of wealthy automobile builder William Crapo Durant, was severely shaken when her airplane crashed through the fence of an airport at Santa Barbara, Calif. With her was a pilot and a Dr. N. H. Brish, physician to rich Stanley McCormick at the great estate where Mr. McCormick is held virtual prisoner as an incompetent.

The Santiago, Chile, firm of Brusadelli & Manni, suing General Motors Acceptance Corp. for having called them bankrupt, last week had genial Lory K. Bethune, Chilean manager for General Motors, jailed for "interrogation." Mr. Bethune, of Atlanta, Ga., was held incommunicado, denied counsel. It required two heated notes from U. S. Ambassador William Smith Culbertson to get him out of jail. Subsequently Mariano Puga Vega, a lawyer for General Motors, challenged the chief attorney for Brusadelli & Manni to a duel.

In Nice, French Riviera, deep-dimpled Mrs. Fred G. Nixon-Nirdlinger, the young U. S. citizen who slew her elderly Philadelphia husband (TIME, March 23), was loudly cheered by 1,000 Niceois when she went to court to plead for bail. Bail was denied. The prisoner was returned to the cell which she shares with a French Negress charged with murder, was told that she may have to spend the Summer there awaiting trial.

Editor Ray Long of Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan magazine gave a dinner at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan for Boris Pilnyak, visiting Russian novelist (The Naked Year). Sinclair Lewis was to deliver the speech of welcome. But in response to Host Long's introduction Novelist Lewis drawled: "I am very happy to meet Mr. Pilnyak. But I do not care to speak in the presence of one man who has plagiarized 3,000 words from my wife's book on Russia. Nor do I care to talk before two sage critics who have lamented the action of the Nobel committee in selecting me as America's representative writer."

All the distinguished litterateurs, editors and colyumists present looked apprehensively at dour, bulky Theodore Dreiser.* Mr. Dreiser reddened but sat still, said nothing. Colyumists Heywood Broun and Arthur Brisbane who might have been the two "sage critics" in question, joined in the embarrassing silence. Then Host Long called on jovial Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb to save the situation. Mr. Cobb told Visitor Pilnyak that those present were very fond of him and esteemed him very highly, since, "you see, we don't know enough about you yet to be jealous of you."

After dinner, Messrs. Dreiser and Lewis were observed in a corner, talking heatedly, thumping a table. Suddenly Mr. Dreiser rose, smacked Mr. Lewis's cheek with his large right hand. Mr. Lewis said something more. Again Mr. Dreiser smacked him before friends pushed the two apart.

Eight hours prior, in a Manhattan lecture, Mr. Lewis had referred to Mr. Dreiser as "one of the greatest American writers." Some 16 hours later, to a large, expectant crowd in Toledo's Town Hall, he praised Mr. Dreiser's Sister Carrie and The Financier as "splendid examples of American writing," apologized for not being in a more "ferocious mood."

*In November 1928 Mrs. Lewis, the former Dorothy Thompson, keen and clever Berlin correspondent for the New York Evening Post, accused Mr. Dreiser of "lifting" long passages from her book The New Russia and printing them in his own later-published Dreiser Looks a Russia.

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