Читать книгу Verena in the Midst - E. V. Lucas - Страница 30

Table of Contents

My Dear Verena,—I have only just heard of your accident and cannot understand why you did not let me know sooner. But perhaps, poor thing, you can’t write. I heard it through the Hothams, who had been told by Pauline Bankes. Still even if you can’t write yourself you must have some one there who can. Dictating is not an easy thing, I know, but even a postcard would have been better than nothing, and then I would have written at once to cheer you up. But if you do send a postcard, you will be careful, won’t you, not to put anything very private on it, as they are all read here. It was how the village heard of poor Colonel Onslow’s daughter’s elopement. No doubt you were too ill to think of all your friends, and yet in the night, when one thinks of so much, I wonder my name didn’t occur to you.

Writing letters is no hardship to me, as it is to so many people. My brother John, for instance, can’t bring himself to put pen to paper at all, and his study is always littered up with unanswered things. It is very odd, I always think, that the son of so methodical a man as father was should be so careless, but I expect it is a throwback or comes from mother’s side. I am much more like father in so many ways, as well as having the Parrish nose and the ears set so far forward, while John and the others favour the Pegrams.

You must let me know if there is anything I can do for you besides writing now and then. Of course, if you were able to knit it would be better, although there is no one to knit for now. All the girls that I see knitting are working only for themselves—those jumpers they wear without corsets, so very indelicate, I think, especially when the bust is at all full. It is all so different from the War, when people were really unselfish. As long as I can remember, I, personally, have knitted for others; not that I want to take credit for it, but it is nice to be able to be of service. When I was a child it was mittens for the gardener and the coachman or else those poor Deep Sea Fishermen.

I suppose you have all the books you want. You have always been so well provided for, but there’s a little comforting bedside volume by Frances Ridley Havergal which I am sending in case you should want anything of that sort. It has always helped me, and the other day, after so many years, I read Queechy again and found it quite exciting, so I am putting that in too. Many of the modern books are so outré.

My rheumatism has been rather worse lately, but I mustn’t tell you things like that when you are so ill yourself. I should like to know what your doctor says about you. There was a poor lady here who slipped and fell and hurt her back, very much in the same way, I should imagine, and she lived only a few hours. And dear old Sir Benjamin Pike, my father’s friend and fellow magistrate, came to his end in the same way, through a banana skin. I am sure the regulations about throwing banana and orange skins away in the streets should be more strict. In my childhood we never saw bananas at all, and now they are everywhere. How odd it is that fashions in fruit should change as well as fashions in bodies and in dress, although I for one am against so much change in dress and think the advertisements in the weekly papers are dreadful in their incitement to women to spend money, especially now when the Prime Minister tells us we should all save, and I am sure he is right. And the money people gave for pearls too, at the Red Cross sale! Perfectly marvellous where it all comes from, and how different we all are! Those millionaires buying pearls for their wives, and me here quite happy with the mosaic brooch my father brought me from Venice and the agate clasp which belonged to dear mother.

I must stop now or I shall miss the post.—Always your loving friend,

Louisa