My Dear Verena,—I was glad to have your niece’s letter saying that you are progressing nicely. I am so afraid of those falls, and you never know even when you feel well again whether there may not be some underlying trouble to break out again at any moment. We shall all pray that nothing of the kind will happen to you. I can’t help wishing that you had the advantage of being attended by our dear Dr. Courage. He is so clever and kind and thoughtful.
My rheumatism has been troubling me again lately and nothing seems to do it any good. I deny myself sugar and potatoes and everything that is said to foster it, but to no purpose. I fear it is so deep-seated that I shall be a martyr to it all my life, but there is this consolation that they say that people who have rheumatism seldom have anything else. In this world we can’t expect to be too happy.
We have been in great trouble lately through want of maids. I don’t know what has come over the servant class, but they don’t seem to value a good place at all any more. Maid after maid has been here and has left. Whether it is that we haven’t a cinema near, or what, I don’t know, but they won’t stay. And the wages they ask are terrible. It seems to me that the world has gone mad. The wonderful thing is that they can always find some one to carry their boxes, and they get away so quickly. Not that we have ever missed anything, but they seem to decide to go all of a sudden, and no kind of consideration for us, and me with my rheumatism, ever stops them. How different from my young days when old Martha our cook went on for ever at I am sure not more than twenty pounds a year, and Arthur the butler never dreamed of leaving or asking for a rise. But since the War everybody is wild for excitement and change. I must stop now as the Doctor is waiting downstairs.—Your sincerely loving friend,
Louisa
P.S.—I re-open this, later, to say that I have just heard that my poor cousin Lady Smythe is to undergo an operation.
XLIX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
Verena, my dear, apropos of the newspapers and your dread of all their alarms and excursions, don’t believe everything you read. Fleet Street has to live, and it can do so only by selling its papers, which have first to be filled. Take, as an example of exaggeration, the outcry against Departmental inefficiency as if it were a new thing. It has always been the same, only the scale was larger during the War and after it. There have always been round pegs in square holes, and disregard of public money, and, as I happen to know, improper destruction of documents.
You say you want a story now and then. Well, here is one from my own experience, gathered as it happens in the very country the violation of which brought us into the struggle, and bearing upon official cynicism too.