Explore "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony" 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.