"
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.
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