The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni — Read

At the end of three weeks, Roger wrote his first real letter. He was going on to the Pennsylvania coal fields, then to New York, the West Virginia mining country, the southern cotton mills and home. It would take him fully a month longer. Anne read it several times, as if committing the itinerary to memory, gathered no picture or quickening of interest from it, and slowly tore the pages up. Roger might have mapped a trip from star to star, so little did it seem to touch her life. The only realities were this growing antagonism between herself and Roger, and the helplessness of her father and Rogie. Between these two points of advancing Death and Life, Anne stood, making mechanical motions of getting up, going to bed, caring for Rogie, listening to Hilda's chatter, and filling some of the empty hours for her father.

This was the most difficult of all. No book held him, although he complained if none were provided for him. His fettered mind exhausted itself in the effort to assimilate experience beyond his own. He would put away the travels and biographies and fiction, for which Anne spent hours searching the library, for the evening paper or the most trivial bit of gossip. Sometimes this need to fill the emptiness about him with little concrete facts oppressed Anne until her very jaws ached with the unuttered words she could not summon, and her brain went dizzily round, searching in the vacancy, conscious of its own motion.