Explore "A Reaping" by E.F. Benson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
This once-happy family has suddenly returned to the pit whence it was digged, and it is impossible to imagine any more depressing spectacle than we present. Dawn in faint flickers is beginning to shine on the wreck, and occasionally for a moment or two, though we may be over-sanguine, Helen and I can dimly imagine being happy again. Legs cannot do that yet; it is still midnight gloom with him.
The intelligent reader will scarcely need to be told that it is the influenza that has blackened the world like this. Helen began, and Legs and I followed within twenty-four hours. That, somehow, is a relief to her, since she feels she did not give it us. As if it mattered where it came from! Besides, personally I would rather catch it from her than anyone else. Legs has had the worst visitation, because, after it was quite certain he had got it, he persisted in attending the last night of the autumn opera season, did not enjoy it at all, of course, by reason of a splitting headache, and was really ill for a day or two. I was infinitely wiser. As soon as the nymph touched me with her fairy hand I went firmly to bed, turned my face to the wall like Hezekiah, and stopped there till the fever was over. After five days I tottered downstairs to find an old, old woman sitting by the fire. It was Helen.