"Plumb to Hell"

Before taking post at the Court of St. James's General Charles Gates Dawes last week appeared in Washington to confer with the Secretary of State. Also, the following occurred:

Reporter: "Mr. Ambassador, are you taking any of those silk court knickers with you to London? "

Ambassador Dawes: " Do you want a diplomatic answer or the answer that deserves?"

Reporter: "Shoot!" Ambassador Dawes: "Then you go plumb to hell--that's my business."

News cameramen pushed around for pictures.

Ambassador Dawes:"I'd better take this pipe out of my mouth, I'm a diplomat now [pause]; no, by gosh, I won't."

Eyeing his brief case in the path of the cameras he tossed it aside and said: "I want to get this badge of bureaucracy hidden where it won't show."

At the Senate Ambassador Dawes held a reception, spied New Jersey's Senator Edge, whom President Hoover, it is reported, will soon make Ambassador to France.

Ambassador Dawes: "Hello, Walter, I hear you are going to Paris."

Senator Edge, already the diplomat: "Charlie, the fact that you will be just across the Channel in London almost persuades me to apply for the Paris job."

Ambassador Dawes: "Why, I thought that was all settled. I only decided to go to London when I heard that you would be in Paris."

Of his successor, Vice President Curtis, Ambassador Dawes remarked: "Charlie sure is a splendid presiding officer."

Then the Ambassador asked many a Senatorial friend to lunch with him in the Capitol and, jokester that he is, left the bill to be paid by Senate Leader Watson of Indiana.

Pending definite news, Senator Edge was internally atwitter over the prospect of being "just across the Channel, Charlie." A somewhat rotund, full-blooded gentleman of 54, with a history--printer's devil to millionaire-statesman--vaguely reminiscent of the first of U. S. ministers to France (Benjamin Franklin), he might feel, if he got the post, that he had earned it. He has worked up the Republican ladder diligently, from clerk in the New Jersey State Senate, to Governor, to the U. S. Senate. His earnestness and lack of poise while speech-making make him accompany his words with an up-and-down motion of the elbows which has brought him, among newsmen, the title of "The Jersey Buzzard," which he bears cheerfully. Lately his earnestness is reported to have taken the form of deep religious feeling.

As an Ambassador, especially to France, he would be most fortunate in his wife. His first wife, Lady Lee Phillips of Memphis, died in 1915. Six years ago, aged 48, he married Miss Camilla Loyall Ashe Sewall, some 20 years his junior, beauteous daughter of a rich and celebrated ship-building family of Bath, Me. She has borne him four children (the fourth arrived last month [TIME, May 6]). There are few things which the French admire more than Beauty, Motherhood, Wealth.