Mummy and Homer Clegg's Agreement to Divorce

Georgiana’s mother and Homer Clegg’s unexpected convergence in Reno transforms a plan shaped by evasion and anxiety into a mutual prospect of divorce. She had feared that Homer’s arrival would close off her future with Max von Strohheim; instead, she learns that he, too, wants the marriage ended. The reversal promises to free both spouses, though the divorce has not yet been completed when the family turns toward home.

Background and the Nevada plan

Georgiana’s mother had already decided that she wanted to escape her marriage to Homer. She described him as a deeply religious man who had wanted her to live on a ranch in Texas, a prospect she found intolerable. When she first explained the American plan, she said she had been told that a quick divorce could be obtained in Reno, Nevada, and that Homer would not necessarily need to appear. Her strategy therefore depended on finding a way around the need for his participation, not on persuading him to change his mind.

That apparent route to freedom came with a practical complication. Stella Brightwell told her that Nevada imposed a six-week residency requirement, news that alarmed her. Cy Goldman suggested there were ways around the requirement, but the material does not specify what those methods were. The episode thus establishes both the attraction of Nevada as a place to seek divorce and the uncertainty surrounding the rules she would have to navigate. Georgiana’s mother arrives in Reno with a plan, but not with assurance that it will work.

The plan also belongs to a larger tension between marriage as private choice and marriage as a condition constrained by custom. Earlier, Georgiana had argued that the Prince of Wales could not marry a divorced woman because he would become head of the Church of England, which did not accept divorce. That conversation concerns the prince rather than her mother, but it makes the contrast in their circumstances visible: public tradition may place formidable limits on a royal marriage, while Georgiana’s mother looks to Nevada for a way to change her own marital status.

Homer’s arrival and the reversal

The expected solution becomes a crisis when a telegram from Reno reports that Homer has appeared in person. Georgiana’s mother treats the news as disastrous, fearing that he will refuse to divorce her and that Max will therefore be unable to marry her. Her alarm turns the arrival into a reversal of the original plan: the spouse she had hoped not to need is now physically present, and his presence seems to put her future at risk.

Georgiana travels with her mother to Reno in a rented car with a driver. The journey crosses mountains, lakes, and forests before reaching Nevada’s dry scrub and heat. Throughout the trip, her mother repeatedly worries that everything she had hoped for is lost. Georgiana waits in a small bungalow at the ranch while her mother goes to look for Homer, leaving the outcome unresolved from her daughter’s point of view.

The suspense breaks when Georgiana’s mother returns quickly, her hair out of place and her face bright with relief. Homer had not known she was in Reno. More important, he had come there because he wanted a quick divorce from her himself: he had found someone he wanted to marry. The coincidence reverses the apparent threat. Rather than being summoned to defend the marriage or block her plans, Homer has independently arrived seeking the same outcome.

Prospective freedom and the decision to leave

Georgiana’s mother tells her daughter that the situation is now all right and expects the divorce to be completed within a few days. That forecast is the immediate resolution of the event, but it is not confirmation that the legal process has already concluded. The distinction matters: the news changes her expectation from impending failure to imminent freedom, while the divorce itself remains in the future at this point in the narrative.

The parallel motives make the resolution unusually practical. Georgiana’s mother had wanted to end the marriage so that she could marry Max; Homer’s new wish to marry someone else gives him his own reason to seek an end to it. His earlier religious puritanism had seemed to her an obstacle, but his present objective shows that his position has changed when a new marriage becomes his concern. The scene does not explain that change further; it lets the shared desire for divorce, rather than a reconciliation or a contest of persuasion, clear the way.

The family’s plans change with the news. Georgiana asks whether they are expected to attend Cyrus Goldman’s funeral, but her mother dismisses the idea: she expects many people to be there and says that she and Homer were not close friends. She also says she has had enough of America and wants to return home, citing her dislike of American ideas of equality and her wish to buy decent face cream. Georgiana privately shares her eagerness to leave. The promised divorce therefore resolves one problem while ending the family’s American stay before the funeral.

Narrative significance

The event’s force comes from the reversal between feared obstruction and unexpected cooperation. At first, Homer’s arrival seems to threaten the life Georgiana’s mother hopes to build with Max; once she speaks to him, his separate intention makes the same arrival the means by which that future may become possible. The revelation is not that he has been persuaded, but that he had already come to Reno for his own reason.

The resolution remains deliberately bounded. The narrative records the couple’s aligned intentions and Georgiana’s mother’s expectation that they will be divorced in a few days, then moves toward departure. It does not show the divorce being finalized or establish whether the proposed marriage to Max takes place. What it does establish is a decisive change in prospects: a journey undertaken under the shadow of failure ends with the marriage’s dissolution apparently within reach, and with Georgiana’s mother ready to leave America rather than remain for another obligation.