For a while he received a weekly letter from Undine.  Vague and disappointing though they were, these missives helped him through the days; but he looked forward to them rather as a pretext for replies than for their actual contents.  Undine was never at a loss for the spoken word:  Ralph had often wondered at her verbal range and her fluent use of terms outside the current vocabulary.  She had certainly not picked these up in books, since she never opened one:  they seemed rather like some odd transmission of her preaching grandparent’s oratory.  But in her brief and colourless letters she repeated the same bald statements in the same few terms.  She was well, she had been “round” with Bertha Shallum, she had dined with the Jim Driscolls or May Beringer or Dicky 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....