Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 111: C Verena Raby to Nicholas Devose

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About This Book

Presented as a sequence of letters, the work follows the responses of friends and relatives when a woman at her country home sustains a spinal injury and must remain flat for a long recovery. Correspondence records medical opinions, practical arrangements for nursing and household care, visitors and neighborhood support, and small domestic consolations such as reading aloud, recorded music, and an adapted form of solitaire. Through exchanges of news, requests, and observations, the letters map family connections and local characters while illustrating how community, resourcefulness, and affectionate concern reshape daily life during enforced convalescence.

C
Verena Raby to Nicholas Devose

Dear,—I have thought much since your last letter and more still since the telegram came. Please do not come yet. I could not bear it. Old as the rest of me has become, all that appertains to you is preserved, as though in some heart-cell apart, and as fresh as yesterday. I am not equal to the emotion of seeing you just yet, nor am I sure that I want to. The you that I know is no longer the you that others see—he is young and ambitious and often masterful and yet with such strange fits of misgiving. But I should love to have a portfolio of your sketches, if you could trust them to the railway. Choose those that you think the best or that you made under the happiest conditions. No, let there be one or two when you were least happy.

Are you grey? I am.

Serena