Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 91: LXXX Verena Raby to Nicholas Devose

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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.

LXXX
Verena Raby to Nicholas Devose

Dear,—Your letter was indeed a voice from the past—almost from the grave. It was kind of you—it was like you—to write, but I almost wish you had not. I have a long memory. Come back if you will, but do not come here without letting me first know that you are in England. But for your own sake I think you ought to return now and then and challenge criticism. It is not fair, either to yourself or to others, to bury all those beautiful pictures-for I am sure they are beautiful. You could not do anything that was not beautiful or distinguished. I am growing stronger every day and the doctors are hopeful about my being, able to be active again, almost if not quite as before. Nicholas, believe this, I have no quarrel with fate, my life has been happier far than not.

Serena