Chapter 21 - Page 2

Bowles, the weather was too lovely or too awful; such was the gist of
her news. On the last page she hoped Paul was well and sent him a kiss;
but she never made a suggestion concerning his care or asked a question
about his pursuits. One could only infer that, knowing in what good
hands he was, she judged such solicitude superfluous; and it was thus
that Ralph put the matter to his mother.

"Of course she's not worrying about the boy--why should she? She knows
that with you and Laura he's as happy as a king."

To which Mrs. Marvell would answer gravely: "When you write, be sure
to say I shan't put on his thinner flannels as long as this east wind
lasts."

As for her husband's welfare. Undine's sole allusion to it consisted
in the invariable expression of the hope that he was getting along all
right: the phrase was always the same, and Ralph learned to know
just how far down the third page to look for it. In a postscript she
sometimes asked him to tell her mother about a new way of doing hair or
cutting a skirt; and this was usually the most eloquent passage of the
letter. What satisfaction he extracted from these communications he
would have found it hard to say; yet when they did not come he missed
them hardly less than if they had given him all he craved. Sometimes the
mere act of holding the blue or mauve sheet and breathing its scent was
like holding his wife's hand and being enveloped in her fresh young
fragrance: the sentimental disappointment vanished in the penetrating
physical sensation. In other moods it was enough to trace the letters
of the first line and the last for the desert of perfunctory phrases
between the two to vanish, leaving him only the vision of their
interlaced names, as of a mystic bond which her own hand had tied.
Or else he saw her, closely, palpably before him, as she sat at her
writing-table, frowning and a little flushed, her bent nape showing the
light on her hair, her short lip pulled up by the effort of composition;
and this picture had the violent reality of dream-images on the verge of
waking. At other times, as he read her letter, he felt simply that at
least in the moment of writing it she had been with him. But in one of
the last she had said (to excuse a bad blot and an incoherent sentence):
"Everybody's talking to me at once, and I don't know what I'm writing."
That letter he had thrown into the fire....

After the first few weeks, the letters came less and less regularly:
at the end of two months they ceased. Ralph had got into the habit of
watching for them on the days when a foreign post was due, and as the
weeks went by without a sign he began to invent excuses for leaving the
office earlier and hurrying back to