the children are now at
the university, so there is no fear of the shock for them — especially since I have been living in desertion, of mind and body, for several years.
What divorce meant, or what circles concern themselves with it, had never crossed my thoughts before; but the call of Reno found an answer in my soul — and would that it had not!
Some may think Reno a land of consolation, gaiety, and liberation; but it stifled my breath, and pressed on my chest with a hand of iron, while the shawl of loneliness wrapped me at every moment.
A lawyer was appointed for me the moment I arrived, and I began to feel my lostness and my loneliness in the crowd of hundreds — of women awaiting the issuing of their pardon.
I informed the office I had approached of my need for work, so as to meet my expenses, and I made the round of the bureaus; always the same question confronted me: How long is your stay in Reno? And naturally no office will consent to employ a woman who intends to stay four months in the city. My luck outside the offices was no better than this, and there came a time when I began to feel the sum of money I carried running out. At last I obtained temporary work in an establishment, and it covered my expenses and the children's.
The material help that work gives is no less than the lift it gives one's spirits; and so work fills the time, until one scarcely feels the hours slipping by. The women invented every kind of device for killing time: to buy a necklace, one of them would spend a full four hours!!
Reno is ringed by mountains of magnificent beauty, their peaks clothed in snow most days of the year; around it the lakes ripple their blue, blending with the blue of the sky, and the rivers glide by like glittering necklaces. The heart of the city is constant movement, between farewell and meeting; but the inner life is monotonous, varied only in its kinds of pain.
The women with me took an interest in my case, as I did in theirs; and at every moment there was one bursting into tears, or spending the night wrestling with sleeplessness by means of pills to deaden her nerves. My daughter, who is twenty years old, was not shaken when I told her of our divorce; she answered quite calmly: We shall build a new life with my brother, since we three have always lived together and live together still. And she went on writing to me quite naturally, as though I were passing a holiday far away from her, to come back with fresh energy and vitality.
But when my stay in Reno had run to five weeks, she sent a letter in which she tried to persuade me to return to our old family life. Yet can our life return to its former course? The
idea settled in my head, and I set about searching the past for something with which to build my life anew — from what could I gather the means of building? Had my step been over-hasty? Or ought I to have done this when my children were small? At last I sent her my answer: "I do not know where the Reno road is leading me, but there is no way back home for me" — even while I longed for a happy family life in which my children could find comfort.
And how many times I looked at myself questioningly: Am I that lady, the mother of two children? And quickly there would stand out alone, overwhelming everything, a flash traced in fire, hanging bewildered in the air before me: Tomorrow! Whither?
The days pass swiftly, the case takes its course, and my routine life goes on. I stand for the last time before the judge to receive my diploma, then fly to the station. My eyes cling to the lights, watching the sign and its letters: Welcome to Reno, the biggest little city in the world! In a flash the days I spent here come back to my mind; I push the thought away, then take up my suitcase and walk on. I am cured... I have graduated!
• Celebrations of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen were held at the Public Library in New York. The well-known American actress Eva Le Gallienne read his story "The Ugly Little Heroine" to more than 300 adult listeners.
Andersen, as is well known, wrote a number of famous children's books that have immortalized his name in the world of letters.
A statue of the Danish writer is to be erected in one of New York's squares in tribute to his memory and in his honor.