What she says: I’m fine
What she means: Imagine what it must have been like for people like the Duke of Wellington to live through the industrial revolution. He was almost like a living monument to the rapidly vanishing drama and romance of the previous era. He, and the rest of the nation must have known at the time of his death that the age for men like him was at it’s end and the world would never bear witness to such spectacles again now that wood transformed to iron and steel, and horses became locomotives in the short span of less than 50 years. And considering the Duke’s death shortly after the Great Exhibition of 1851, this stark dichotomy of changing times is made that much more glaring. That kind of change in so short a time has been never-before-seen and it must have been melancholy and vastly lonely and I am not fine.
Waiting for Winter 