THREE LADIES

Three great & good ladies made news last week in New York.

Mrs. Robert Elliott Speer, 59, retired from her 17-year presidency of the National Board of the Y. W. C. A. Wife of the famed Presbyterian leader, Mrs. Speer is mother of Elliott, who is to succeed Dr. Henry Franklin Cutler as principal of Mt. Hermon Boys' School next autumn. Her daughter Margaret teaches English at Peiping's Yenching University. Constance, married and a mother herself, has a doctor husband who studies psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Son William is a junior at Princeton. Tall, slim, white-haired Mrs.

Speer dresses often in black. She gardens at Lakeville, Conn., collects Chinese furniture, curios. Much-traveled, both on her husband's mission work and her own, Mrs. Speer eschews society for her good deeds and her home.

During her freshman year at Bryn Mawr Mrs. Speer heard an address by the late Grace Dodge (first president of the Y. W. C. A.'s national board). In 1893 (her junior year) she left college to marry Dr. Speer. Thereafter her Y. W. C. A. interests grew greater & greater. Since the War, thinks Mrs. Speer, young womanhood has advanced immeasurably. Said she last week: "This generation, for the first time in the history of the world, has a pay envelope." This will produce a new morality, "sought for itself, for decency, for good taste, in a new spirit of self-restraint, which is coming to the fore among our young people."

Mrs. Frederic M. Paistt 51, sister Theresa of Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, was chosen last week to succeed Mrs. Speer. Tall, broad-shouldered, bespectacled, Mrs. Paist is forceful but less reserved than her predecessor. She golfs with her candy-manufacturing husband, swims with her four children. Like her Brother Ray. she attended Stanford University. She is a onetime mathematics teacher, a longtime Y. W. secretary, never politically-minded. Next month she will preside at the monthly meeting of the National Board.

Miss Cornelia M. van Asch van Wyck, world president of the Y. W. C. A., arrived in New York last week. Mem ber of a famed Dutch family (her father was a Deputy in the States-General, two of her brothers are in the diplomatic service), she helped organize the Dutch na tional Y. W. C. A. in 1920, headed it from 1926 until 1930 when she became the first Continental president of the World's Council of the Y. W. C. A.

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