Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 41: XXXIX Antoinette Rossiter to her Mother

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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.

XXXIX
Antoinette Rossiter to her Mother

Dearest Mummy,—When you come home you will find another baby here, only it isn’t a real baby, it’s a puppy. A spaniel. Mr. Hawkes gave it to us and he says we are to own it together so that each of us has a bit. He says I am to have its stomach and mouth, which means I have got to feed it, and Cyril is to have its front legs and ears, and Lobbie its hind legs and tail, and its tongue is to belong to us all. I have told Cyril that you and Daddy ought to have an ear each but he won’t give them up. The ears of a spaniel are the nicest part, next to the lips. It is a girl and Mr. Hawkes says that this means that when it grows up it will be fondest of Cyril. We have named it Topsy because it is a girl and black. Do come home soon and see it.—Your everlastingly loving

Tony

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