One of the capital's most eligible spinsters, comely Virginia Warren, 32, daughter of the Chief Justice of the U.S., was spoken for last week by ABC-TV's longtime ace Newscaster-Vice President John Daly, who also presides over CBS-TV's What's My Line? Their engagement was proclaimed by a Supreme Court press officer. Divorced last April after a 23-year marriage, Daly, 46, broke his ties with ABC after the election in a policy quarrel. The wedding is slated for just before Christmas, in San Francisco.

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In Australia, where quadrigamy may tempt some men but is illegal for all, the portly and jovial Sultan of Pahang, ruler of Malaya's largest state, arrived with one of his four wives, pretty Che' Haabah Bind Ahmad, 25, gave fascinated Down Under newsmen an illustration of marital democracy in action. He explained that each of his wives has her own eight-room, air-conditioned palace, and each takes turns in appearing with him at official ceremonies and traveling with him. Che' reported that she and the other three "get on very well," happily observed that "when a man has four wives, he has to be so fair." How many children does the Sultan have? Che' was certain that she has mothered three by him, but the best guess that the Sultan, 56, could hazard as to the grand total was "about 20."

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Firm in the belief that he will someday waddle back to Egypt in triumph after President Nasser is deposed, Egypt's porcine ex-King Farouk, 40, is grooming his only son, little Prince Ahmed Fuad, 8, to sit in turn upon Egypt's dust-gathering throne. In Switzerland, Fuad attends a village public school in a Lausanne suburb, is rated "an extremely bright" second grader, lives with his three older half sisters. Commuting between his children and Rome, Farouk is now trying to be a model papa. Always a nonsmoking teetotaler, he has even given up his night life, permits himself only one conspicuous indulgence: buxom, blonde Irma Capece Minuto, his on-again-off-again sweetheart, whom Farouk may marry some time. Near Farouk's old capital, Cairo, the son of another dejobbed African leader was studying diligently at French and Arabic. The student: Patrice Lumumba Jr., son of the Congo's on-again-off-again Premier.

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Although Princess Margaret and her husband, sometime Society Photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, have seldom circulated in London's night life since their marriage, last week's Docklands Settlement Ball, a charity affair long one of Margaret's favorites, proved beyond resistance. Notified on very short notice that the Princess and her party of 20 would be there, the ball's tossers had little time to inform some 500 invited white-tie guests that Tony and his male companions would attend in dinner jackets and no decorations (of which Armstrong-Jones, as it happens, has none). The word forthwith went out that white ties were not obligatory--but too late. Tony & Co. were virtually alone in their sartorial simplicity. The good-timing went on into the small hours. Next day, as if to prove that the striped trousers life was not for him, Tony was treated by two orthopedic surgeons for back pains said to be caused by standing too long at official functions with his hands clasped behind him.

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Few British Laborites ever so loudly damned the rich as the late Aneurin Bevan, who once ticked off the landed gentry as "vermin." Supplementing his own $4,900-a-year salary as an M.P. with writing, ex-Coal Miner Bevan spent his last years on a 52-acre farm in Buckinghamshire, taking up with delight many of the ways of his erstwhile class enemies, while sticking to his old convictions. When Nye Bevan's estate was probated last week, it was totted up at $65,766.80--a tidy amount to accumulate in tax-burdened Britain.

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The longest-lived of all U.S. Vice Presidents (and older than any President lived to be), Uvalde, Texas' own John Nance ("Cactus Jack") Garner, turned 92 and didn't care who knew it. Gone were the cigars and bourbon and branch water ("striking a blow for liberty") that he gave up just before his 90th birthday. He is still quick to provide visitors with the wherewithal to strike their own blows, but his current personal quaff is just plain grapefruit juice.

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Some 500 guests converged on the White House at week's end to meet the two nieces of Mamie Eisenhower at the first coming-out party to be held in the executive mansion since 1910. The previous occasion: the debut of President Wil liam Howard Taft's daughter Helen. The cream of official Washington society, in what is likely to be Mamie's swan song as White House hostess, met Ellen Moore, 19, and Mamie Eisenhower Moore, 18, daughters of the First Lady's sister, M. (for Mabel) Frances Moore. Reminiscing about her own White House debut and other gay days, retired Bryn Mawr College Dean Helen Taft Manning, 69, relived a Christmastime dance of long ago: "Mother and father were oldfashioned, and along about 3 o'clock they wanted to go to bed themselves. So things came to an end. We didn't dance till dawn--which I would have liked."

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