Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 9: VIII Richard Haven to Rhoda Carlyon

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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.

VIII
Richard Haven to Rhoda Carlyon

Dear Mrs. Carlyon, we are all very grateful to you for being such a good Samaritan to our dear Verena. The word neighbour henceforward will have a new meaning for me; but why we should naturally be amiably disposed to people because they cultivate the normally objectionable practice of living near or next door to us I never understood. You, however, have behaved so nobly that I shall now think of neighbours as being human too,—I am, yours sincerely,

Richard Haven