"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:

Before a rustling audience of 75, oldtime Actress Maude Adams (Peter Pan, The Little Minister) swept into a Manhattan courtroom to defend herself in a prosaic $200,000 lawsuit. Carried away with the scene, the World-Telegram reported: "The courtroom was crowded with staidly gowned women and mustachioed old gentlemen. . . . On November 6, 1905, Peter Pan's cue line, spoken in the nursery, read: 'Dear night light, that protects my sleeping babes, burn clear and steadfast tonight.' . . . Today an attorney said: 'Miss Adams, will you take the stand, please?'

Among the audience the newshawk located "an elderly man in a blue suit, with twinkling eyes" who reminisced: "When I first saw her I remember she wore a long grey coat trimmed with black fur. I remember her eyes looking out from the fur. . . . She is quite as beautiful now."

Similarly moved, the Herald Tribune: "She wore a brown coat with a mink collar which she held up around her face continuously, and a small brown hat, almost tricorne in shape, similar to her headdress in Peter Pan. . . . She walked gracefully to the stand, stood erect for a moment, then turned and bowed to Justice McNamee . . . another bow to the jury . . . she seated herself."

Actress Adams was being sued by a promoter who claimed to have engineered her "comeback" in The Merchant of Venice, which toured the U. S. in 1931, never reached Broadway. The American: "Miss Adams was at ease in her new role, smiling frequently and injecting bits of unexpected comedy into her lines." Witness Adams testified all day "in a clear, modulated voice heard throughout the courtroom," exchanged more bows with judge and jury, made her exit. Four days later the jury, unmoved by Miss Adams' performance, awarded the suing promoter, one John D. Williams, $25,000.

For $4,500 Allan Hoover bought the West Branch, Iowa, birthplace of his father Herbert Hoover,

Into Los Angeles from his $2,000,000 castle in Death Valley chugged Walter Scott ("Death Valley Scotty") in an old, rebuilt Franklin. Snorted he: "These city trails ain't no place for this locomotive. It's a specially made model for traversing the desert mountains into the Valley. . . . It goes 700 miles without stopping. Got a 100-gallon gas tank and carry ten gallons of oil."

Thomas William Lamont, longtime partner & spokesman of the House of Morgan, addressed to the New York Times a column-long letter in refutation of the current thesis that his firm's financial enlistment with the Allies helped mightily to draw the U. S. into the War. Taking off from a repetition of that thesis by R. L. Duffus in a Times review of Harold Nicolson's biography of the late Morgan Partner Dwight Morrow (TIME, Oct. 7), Partner Lamont argued:

"I wonder whether Mr. Duffus could be laboring under the impression, which some persons seem to have, that this firm or any of its partners carried on propaganda in favor of our going to war; or whether he thinks that we attempted to influence Washington in favor of war. Nothing could be further from the truth! Or does he suppose that, in offering to American investors the obligations of the Allies, we could have sold them on arguments that the Allied cause was right,, and that therefore the bonds should be bought as a moral duty, instead of on their merits as investments? . . .

"Does anyone, even of the post-War generation, believe that business interest determined the pro-Ally sentiments of Morrow or Morgan or Davison or any of us? Surely not. Like most of our contemporaries and friends and neighbors, we wanted the Allies to win, from the outset of the War. We were pro-Ally by inheritance, by instinct, by opinion. . . . Further, can anyone believe that the Allied demand for American supplies was created by our firm? The demand, of course, was created by the War. . . . If we had not acted, it would have continued just the same. . . .

"Our countrymen are being invited to accept blithely the legend that it was American business men rather than Germany who got us into the War. . . . But it is not history, and it does not accord with what happened on April 6, 1917. . . . President Wilson hoped to help 'make the world safe for democracy.' And the American people followed him in that hope. Perhaps he--perhaps all America--was under a delusion. But a people's hindsight 18 years after the event is naturally somewhat different from its foresight."

Sailing up New York Harbor on his return from Paris, Franklyn Laws Hutton, loving father of Countess Barbara Hutton Haugwitz, was cornered by ship-news reporters. "Is Barbara going to have a baby?" chorused they. Hiding his face, Papa Hutton quickened his pace, almost stumbled over a cameraman. Said lofty Mrs. Hutton, his second wife: "We will not discuss the report."

In Paris Daughter Barbara was found slipping into some new dresses. "Yes, it's true," she gurgled. ". . . The end of February or early in March."

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