MEANWHILE

Mr. H. G. Wells has elucidated for the readers of the New York Times-his course of conduct in an agreeable but highly improbable dilemma. If he were standing on a dock with only a single life preserver, and on the one side Pavloff, the famous Russian vivisectionist, were struggling in the water and on the other, splashing and blowing, were George Bernard Shaw, Mr. Wells would pause not, but play to first. It is not that he hates Animal Rescue League more, but he loves Shaw loss. "To the future," he says, "Shaw will have contributed nothing, and yet he may be harder to forget than Pavloff because his extraordinary industry in sitting to painters, photographers and sculptors will fill the galleries of the future with his portraits, medals, statues and busts."

Mr. Wells would have changed to a new figure of speech if he had remembered that Shaw at 71 excels in back somersaults from the high springboard. It is to be hoped that the occasion never arrives with Wells in the water and Shaw on the dock: Mr. Wells would doubtless receive a weighted life preserver, while Shaw was using the chest carry to bring Mr. Pavloff ashore.