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 Washington Square to search the letter-box for a big tinted envelope with a straggling blotted superscription.

Undine’s departure had given him a momentary sense of liberation:  at that stage in their relations any change would have brought relief.  But now that she was gone he knew she could never really go.  Though his feeling for her had changed, it still ruled his life.  If he saw her in her weakness he felt her in her power:  the power of youth and physical radiance that clung to his disenchanted memories as the scent she used clung to her letters.  Looking back at their four years of marriage he began to ask himself if he had done all he could to draw her half-formed spirit from its sleep.  Had he not expected too much at first, and grown too indifferent in the sequel?  After all, she was still in the toy age; and perhaps the very extravagance of his love had retarded her growth, helped to imprison her in a little circle of frivolous illusions.  But the last months had made a man of him, and when she came back he would know how to lift her to the height of his experience.

So he would reason, day by day, as he hastened back to Washington Square; but when he opened the door, and his first glance at the hall table showed him there was no letter there, his illusions shrivelled down to their weak roots.  She had not written:  she did not mean to write.  He and the boy were no longer a part of her life.  When she came back everything would be as it had been before, with the dreary difference that she had tasted new pleasures and that their absence would take the savour from all he had to give her.  Then the coming of another foreign mail would lift his hopes, and as he hurried home he would imagine new reasons for expecting a letter....

Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection, and at last, when the strain had become unbearable, he cabled her.  The answer ran:  “Very well best love writing”; but the promised letter never came....

He went on steadily with his work:  he even passed through a phase of exaggerated energy.  But his baffled youth fought in him for air.  Was this to be the end?  Was he to wear his life out in useless drudgery?  The plain prose of it, of course, was that the economic situation remained unchanged by the sentimental catastrophe and that he must go on working for his wife and child.  But at any rate, as it was mainly for Paul that he would henceforth work, it should be on his own terms and according to his inherited notions of “straightness.”  He would never again engage in any transaction resembling his compact with Moffatt.  Even now he was not sure there had been anything crooked in that; but the fact of his having instinctively referred the point to Mr. Spragg rather than to his grandfather implied a presumption against it.