Explore "Ultima Thule" by Henry Handel Richardson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
But these were night thoughts. By day, when the children were their very human selves--high-spirited, quarrelsome, up to endless mischief --the question of Richard and Richard's welfare again took first place in her mind.
The improvement she had so hoped for him, in his pleasant, care--free surroundings, did not come to pass. She saw this, not so much from what the doctors wrote--they were painfully guarded--as from his own letters to her. Week by week these grew more incoherent; not words only, whole sentences were now being left out. They were written, too, in a large, unformed, childish hand, which bore no likeness to his fine, small writing; were smudged, and ill-spelt. She felt them as shameful, and directly she had deciphered them hid them away: no eye but hers should see to what depths he had sunk.