Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 33: XXXI Verena Raby to Richard Haven

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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.

XXXI
Verena Raby to Richard Haven

My Dear Richard,—This is my first letter in my own hand and it must be short. I am very grateful to you. Would not that be a nice epitaph—“He never disappointed”? Well, it is true of you.

Your idea of the short poems is perfect and I have already learned some.

Nesta is excellent company, but I fear she is giving me more time than it is fair to take. Every now and then, when she is apparently looking at me, I can see that her glance is really fixed on her children, many miles off. The far-away nursery look.

It is almost worth being ill to discover how kind people can be. If it is true (and of course it is) that to give pleasure to others is the greatest happiness, then I can comfort myself, as I lie here apparently useless, that I have my uses after all, since I am the cause of that happiness in so many of my friends.—Yours,