Retreat on the Hudson

For years she was in the news almost daily. When she made a triumphal tour of the U.S., millions came to see & hear her. A year ago, ill and exhausted, she retired from public life, 10,000 miles from her homeland. Last week Mme. Chiang Kai-shek was nearing the end of her retirement, and looking forward to the day.

Since last October, when she left a Manhattan hospital, she has been living quietly in a 17-room, rambling Tudor mansion in the Riverdale section of The Bronx, overlooking the Hudson River. She has seen almost no one, not even her nearest neighbor, Maestro Arturo Toscanini.

Suffering from exhaustion, nervousness and a chronic skin disease, she has kept to herself, spending much of her time in a shrubbery-screened garden. With her are her nephew and niece, L. K. Kung and Mrs. Rosamond Chen, children of Dr. H. H. Kung, China's onetime Minister of Finance. She has four servants. Sometimes there are visitors--old American and Chinese friends, classmates from her days at Wellesley College.

At home she wears Chinese clothes. But on the rare occasions when she goes out, she wears American sports clothes. One of her recent visits was to a women's prison at Bedford Hills, near by, to gather information for use in the reform of China's prison system. There she chatted earnestly with the matron and inmates. Her reading is largely in the field of social reform.

Mme. Chiang's health has greatly improved. She originally left China on the advice of her American physician, who told her she would never recover in Chungking's humid climate. At that time there were also rumors of a rift with the Gissimo, but they were effectively spiked. When cool weather sets in again, she intends to go back and resume her place as China's first lady.

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