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Dearest Aunt Verena,—I do hope you are getting stronger. We are all excited about the vertical Solitaire table and I long to see it. One odd and unexpected effect of your illness is to keep Evangeline quiet and busy. She comes home from school now full of importance and spends hours with her pen. The result, as I think she has told you, is to be a surprise for you. I wish I could do something to help you, but can suggest nothing. Knitting was my only accomplishment and I’m sure you are not short of woollies. Having ordered the day’s food, I have now nothing to do but periodically to eat it, and to go out of my way to be more than amiable to the maids for fear of offending and losing them. You have no notion—you with your divine permanent staff—of the volcanoes we live on here and our constant terror of receiving notice. And this family in particular, because father makes no effort to control his language (but then no one does any more, and if “damn” were a word that infants could lisp they would lisp it—but servants don’t like it), and mother will give us the results of séances, which again servants don’t like or quite understand. Their idea of the dead is something to be put tidily away in a cemetery and visited on Sunday afternoons; not talkative spirits full of messages.

The more I go on in this aimless way the more I want to break loose and live alone without meals and really do something. I was useful during the War and now I’m a machine. My only excitement—and a very doubtful on—is the refusal of dear cousin Horace, who proposes to me every other week.—Your loving

Hazel

P.S.—Poor Fritz has had to be gently brought to his end. We have buried him next to Tiger and father has had the stone engraved with the words:—

HERE LIES

FRITZ THE DACHSHUND

WHO

(ALTHOUGH A GERMAN)

WAS

THE TRUEST FRIEND

AN ENGLISH FAMILY

EVER HAD

1919