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Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 48: XLVI Hazel Barrance to Verena Raby
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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.

XLVI
Hazel Barrance to Verena Raby

My Dear Aunt,—Just one more word, then!—but only to say it’s no good, I can’t agree with you. The idea of marriage being necessarily warfare is utterly repugnant to me, and unless a miracle happens I shall continue to go on doing my best to be happy though single. I see no reason whatever for people to scrap, and those who like it always fill me with a kind of disgust. Married life should be all friendliness and niceness. I feel so strongly about married happiness that I believe if I were asked to name my favorite poem in all poetry I should give the old epitaph on the husband who so quickly followed his wife to the grave:

She first deceased; he for a little tried
To live without her, liked it not, and died.

No news of Horace for quite a long time. I suspect him of searching London for an apothecary of the Romeo and Juliet type who can provide love-philtres and I shall look at my drink very narrowly the next time he dines here or I meet him out. It would be like him to put a love-philtre on the market.—Your loving

H.