They simply took him back, on his
own terms, into the life he had left them to; and their silence had none
of those subtle implications of disapproval which may be so much more
wounding than speech.
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.
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