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Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 84: LXXIII 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.

LXXIII
Verena Raby to Richard Haven

Dear Richard,—Some of your special privileges seem to be coming my way, for I am now largely occupied in writing letters of counsel, chiefly to nephews and nieces in whom the fever of love burns or does not burn. Theodore’s girl is the last—so very much a child of the moment as to think that wanting a thing and having it should be synonymous. I am feeling very grateful I am not a mother and I felicitate with you on your non-paternity. Parents just now are anything but enviable. None the less....

It’s funny how the young people come to me for help, just as though I were a flitting Cupid instead of a weary stationary horizontal middle-aged female, whose only traffic in the emotions occurred in the dim and distant past and is for ever buried.—Good night,

V.