'A habit of deep devotion'-first thoughts on Josephine Humphrey's Rich In Love

Seeking to secure love, Lucy Odoms, the narrator-heroine of Josephine Humphrey's Rich In Love, endeavors to know, to get inside the head of those close to her. She's a sensible young woman, quick to dismiss mental telepathy and E.S.P. However, these mythic powers which she dismisses suggest the powers of understanding she's after. She believes she can achieve such powers through observation and common sense.

Hers is an epic struggle to understand and make sense of a world that seems almost to purposefully defy her efforts. At the outset of the novel, she comes home one day to find that her mother has up and left with nary an explanation. Happening on a brief and comically matter-of-fact note her mother's left her dad, Lucy is unaccepting. It fails to make sense to her; "there was no doubt about the message. But not a word of pain or guilt. Not a word of explanation"(18). Lucy writes another more emotional note in her mother's name, detailing a spiritual crisis, "something I need to work out alone"(18).

Lucy believes in observation. She places a premium on what she can see; her keen eyesight not only noting that her abandoned and grieving father needed a haircut but that also "his nostrils clipped"(37). Recognizing that sight can only observe the present, Lucy is attached to history, both big picutre history and personal history, even if she remains "a little nervouss about the fallibility of history...so much gets lost!"(51). She is opposed to poetry and romance; she repeatedly accuses her father of resorting to these villains when he fondly thinks back over his collapsing marriage.

Ultimately, at the outset of this novel, Lucy is fiercely opposed to certain facts about the world. Facts about the world that can't be changed, only accepted. She's opposed to all change, and the death it foretokens. She's tortured by the fact that those we love can do whatever they wish with their lives, even if it defies our wishes, our expectations, and the conception upon which our love is based. She can't accept that love tends to have an inevitability about it. It's outside our control. Thus, while Lucy admits she "felt a strong urge to qit loving my father" and wishes she could "just quit, the way you can go down to a bank and draw out your life's savings"(77), she realizes she's "locked into a habit of deep devotion"(77).