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Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 124: CXIII 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.

CXIII
Verena Raby to Nicholas Devose

Dear,—They are beautiful, and so like you. I shall set them up daily, one by one, as you wish—and it is a charming idea and will make the nights so exciting, for some one else will choose them for me and it will be all a surprise! But I had to go through the whole sixty first. How could I wait? Why, I might die!

How wonderful a world it is, and how fortunate are those who can travel about and feast their eyes on it—and yet how sad you rovers must be! Especially at sunset! Some of your painted sunsets are almost more than I can bear, but what they must have been to you I can only guess. And how more than fortunate are those, like you, who can capture so much of all this beauty and preserve it for others!

None the less I don’t envy the traveller. “East, west, home’s best”; and yet perhaps home should rightly be where oneself is; perhaps we are too prone to surround ourselves with comforts in one spot and disregard the big world. But after lying here so long it seems as if there would be no joy in any travel to equal one brief walk round the garden.—Thank you again.

Serena.