She is gone when the volume opens. Hear the funeral road, Morden, the Harlowes arriving after the fact, Lovelace still talking until the talk has nowhere to go. Volume 9 of the letters, unabridged: posthumous pages, a German inn, a meeting that ends a career of talk. Listen to Belford finish other people’s business, and to a close that is not a sermon if you stay in the rooms it happens in. The correspondence stops. The voice that carried it does not plead.
