cowboy chauffeur drew up beside the gray walls of the Nevada Stock Farm on the main road. Polly Wagner started to get out. Then she turned back to me.
“What’s Clem Bonner like?”
I looked a little surprised, I suppose. “Hasn’t Judy told you?”
She shook her head.
“She never mentions him, and when everybody else starts telling what perfectly swell people their husbands are—so you wonder why on earth they’re getting a divorce until you find out that’s part of the Reno pattern—Judy always leaves. I think she’s still frightfully in love with him. I just wondered what sort of a person he is.”
“I should have thought he was perfectly grand,” I said. “I like him a lot. This divorce is all bewildering to me.”
“There’s your car, miss.”
The chauffeur pointed to a station wagon coming along the road. Polly dashed out and stood in the road, waving one hand to them and the other to me. A nice-looking girl driving drew up to take her in. There were five others in the back, all in the clothes people wear at dude ranches, all charming and all laughing . . . and all of them, I thought, remembering what Polly had just told me, belonging to the ninety per cent, with life ahead of them.
I nodded to the driver. I had better get on, it occurred to me, to Judy Bonner of the ten per cent—whose life had stopped, and whose future was only a bewildering memory of the past.
2
Until I’d got that cablegram I now had in my bag, I had in some quite normal way entirely escaped the phenomenon of Reno. A lot of my friends were divorced, of course, but usually the time element hadn’t been urgently important, and when it had been they’d gone to Paris where they could get some clothes at the same time, not Nevada. I’d heard about Reno, about its divorce dens and the open flaunting of its sin and shame, and all the rest of it, but the only very clear picture I had in mind was of apparently respectable lawyers standing with their famous movie star clients in front of a classical-porticoed court house looking rather smugly pompous. Then on the plane coming out a plumbing salesman had called it The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and another salesman had showed me a piece in a sensational magazine calling it The Sodom of the West.
It looked like any other small Southwestern town as we rolled along past the Nevada Stock Farms, a series of pigmy post offices in gray stone with a beautiful sleek Palomino looking over the fence, and down the highway past fruit stands and neat white-fenced houses set in groves of silver-backed cottonwoods—except, of course, for the enormous billboards advertising penny roulette and various hot spots where one dined and danced and gambled. Then it changed as we came closer to the town; it was more prosperous, and busier, as we came into Virginia Street with its elaborate garages and service stations, and the Washoe County court house with its green velvet lawn accented with spears of scarlet cannas, and the Riverside Hotel on one side, and on the other the shady public park in front of the Auditorium, and the handsome new post office, and then, between the post office and the Truckee River, Reno’s other fashionable hotel, the Washoe.
The limousine turned in, a doorman in a purple rayon shirt and blue denims and a kelly-green handkerchief took my bag.
“Hello,” he said. “You just come?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll like it here when you get used to it.”
I said, “I’m sure I will.”
A frightful din of cowbells and honking of horns came up the blazing hot street, fighting with the roar of the steam shovel that I could see tearing at the rocky bed of the Truckee River. A second doorman, dressed in blue denims and a purple rayon shirt with a kelly-green kerchief at his neck, took my bag.
“Just come?” he shouted.
I nodded.
“You’ll like it when you get used to it!” he bellowed.
“I’m sure I will!” I shouted back . . . momentarily surer that I certainly wouldn’t.
He put my bag down in front of the desk. The clerk wore a bright red rayon shirt with a brighter yellow kerchief. “You register from Reno,” he said politely.
I must have looked as bewildered as I felt.
“You register from Reno. There—where it says ‘Address’.”
I know I looked definitely feeble-minded. He smiled as at an especially low-grade child, and said patiently, “You register from Reno—to establish yourself as a permanent resident of Nevada.”
I said, “Oh,” blankly.
He frowned, a definite glint of suspicion coming into his eye.
“You are here for a divorce, aren’t you?”
I had the dreadful feeling that I was being subversive—like going to a party during Prohibition days and refusing a drink. He looked at me very much the way one’s host would have looked then, as if you were plainly implying the liquor was so much poison, and said “Oh.”
“I’m here to stay with Mrs. Bonner,” I explained hastily, and rather apologetically, I’m afraid.
The change was instant.
“Oh, of course—you’re Mrs. Latham, Mrs. Bonner’s aunt. We thought you’d be somewhat older, Mrs. Latham.—But you’re expected!”
He didn’t actually waggle his finger at me, but almost, and he positively trilled the last part of the sentence.
“Jack!”
He summoned a bell hop with black sleeked-down hair, also done up in cowboy boots and blue jeans. “Take Mrs. Latham’s bags up to 308, adjoining Mrs. Bonner’s apartment, and open the connecting door.—Thank you, Mrs. Latham!”
I followed Jack to the elevator. The girl running it had on frontier pants and boots and a pink shirt, and she was chewing gum.
“Mrs. Bonner’s gone riding,” she said. “Who’d she go with, Jack?”
Jack shook his head. “Dunno,” he said. “Some new guy I never saw before.”
The girl smiled reassuringly at me.
“She’ll be back pretty soon,” Jack said. “Did you look in the bar? That’s the place to look in if you want to find anybody in Reno.—Did you see who just blew in?”
For a startled instant I thought he was still talking to me, but he wasn’t. The elevator girl said, “Do you mean the blonde with the silver foxes?”
He nodded. “That’s Kaye Gorman. Baby, did she burn this joint up when she was here three years ago!”
“That was before I came,” the girl said. “But she’s sure going to town with Mr. Cromwell.”
She laughed an odd little laugh. In the narrow oblong mirror in front of her I saw the warning wink the bell hop gave her, and the sudden scared look
