GREAT BRITAIN: The Princess & Her Public

Cheerfully battling a brisk breeze at London Airport for mastery of her smart, flared skirt, Britain's 22-year-old Princess Margaret seemed singularly free of care as she returned home from Africa with her mother last week. But in their papers and over their teacups, her sister's subjects, with rising heat, were arguing the pros & cons of a possible marriage between her and 38-year-old R.A.F. Group Captain Peter Townsend (TIME, July 20), now safely banished to an office in the British embassy at Brussels. There was still no official or royal-family confirmation of the romance, and much tushing in the respectable press at the propriety of even discussing it. Unabashed, London's tabloid Daily Mirror charged boldly into the heart of the matter by conducting a poll of its readers. Of 70,142 Mirror readers who wrote in, 67,907 urged that Princess Margaret be allowed to marry her divorced airman if she wished to; 2,235 said that she should not.