Miss Collins Abroad

First, she was Edith Boiling of Wytheville, Va., of an ancient family, descendant in the ninth generation of Pocahontas.

Second, she was Mrs. Norman Gait, wife of a prominent Washington jeweler.

Third, she was Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, first lady of the land. (Simultaneously she was the step-mother-in-law of William G. McAdoo.)

Last week, twice a widow, she became Miss Eleanor Collins in order to avoid the ubiquity of the press.

Since her second husband's death, she has for the most part lived very quietly in the Capital. Her public acts have been few. When the German Embassy in Washington refused to half-mast its flag at her husband's death, contributions to the American Committee for Relief of German Children began to fall off and she publicly asked in her husband's name that the German children be not made to suffer for the German Embassy's offense.

Later, she visited friends in Virginia (and while there fractured a small bone in her shoulder).

Last July, she thanked Newton D. Baker for a speech she heard him make by radio.

But she maintained her unostentatious way of life and, last week, following a farewell call from her step-son-in-law, departed quietly for Manhattan. It was midnight when Bernard M. Baruch, ex-Chairman of the War Industries Board and friend of the late President, accompanied his daughter. Miss Belle Baruch, and her friend, Miss Eleanor Collins, dressed in deep mourning and carrying a bunch of white gardenias, to their cabins on the Majestic at a pier in Manhattan.

Later, in the early hours of the morning, the Majestic steamed down the bay and out to sea with a cargo of celebrities: Vladimir de Pachmann, Russian pianist; Clarence Dillon, who recently paid $146,000,000 for the Dodge Motor Car Co (TIME, Apr. 13); Colonel James A. Logan Jr., who has been unofficial onlooker for the U. S. at nearly every pow-wow of European diplomats for the past few years, and his bride (see MILESTONES) ; Miss Belle Baruch; and the unobtrusive Miss Collins, quietly sleeping in cabin F53-54 with a bunch of white gardenias reposing in a vase on her dresser.