So he read her from her letters. But herself, the
eyes, and hair, and lips of her, the voice and laugh and smile of
her, the hands and feet of her, always they eluded him.
He was in Alaska one spring, where he had gone to collect material
for his work, when he received the last letter she ever wrote him.
They neither of them knew then it would be the last. She was
leaving London, so the postscript informed him, sailing on the
following Saturday for New York, where for the future she intended
to live.
It worried him that postscript. He could not make out for a long
time why it worried him. Suddenly, in a waste of endless snows, the
explanation flashed across him. Sylvia of the letters was a living
woman! She could travel--with a box, he supposed, possibly with two
or three, and parcels. Could take tickets, walk up a gangway,
stagger about a deck feeling, maybe, a little seasick. All these
years he had been living with her in dreamland she had been, if he
had only known it, a Miss Somebody-or-other, who must have stood
every morning in front of a looking-glass with hairpins in her
mouth. He had never thought of her doing these things; it shocked
him. He could not help feeling it was indelicate of her--coming to
life in this sudden, uncalled-for manner.
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