XXXV
Clemency Power to the Hon. Mrs. Power
Dearest Mother,—I have got a job at last—the least like a War job that you could imagine. I have been engaged to read for an hour or so every day to a Miss Raby, a lady who owing to an accident has to lie still for months and months. After all my adventures in France this is a great change.
Miss Raby lives near Kington in Herefordshire, a long way from London and indeed a long way from anywhere, but it is fine country and there are splendid hills to walk on, Hargest Ridge in particular, where the air is the most bracing I ever knew, and you look over to the Welsh mountains. She has an old spacious house in its own grounds, but I am lodging with one of the villagers; which I greatly prefer. Miss Raby has a nurse, and one of her nieces, a Mrs. Rossiter, who is charming, is with her. I am a sort of extra help and am gradually being allowed to do more and more and now have had the picking of the flowers entrusted to me.
Miss Raby herself is the sweetest creature, a kind of ideal aunt. She is somewhere in the forties, I suppose, and had a very full life, in a quiet way, before she was ill, and she is very brave in bearing her inactivity, which must be terribly irksome at times and especially in very fine weather. I am here nominally to read, but we talk most of the time, and she is never tired of hearing about the War and all my experiences. She knows the part of the garden that every flower comes from, and I think her greatest joy every day is her interview with the gardener.
One thing I have discovered is how very few books bear reading aloud. The authors don’t think of that when they are writing and so the words are wrongly placed. Another thing is that books that are silly anyway are heaps sillier when read aloud.
I ought to say that although I am in Miss Raby’s service (don’t wince) she is not my employer—I was engaged by a Mr. Haven, her oldest friend, who has presented me to her!—Your loving
C.