Information and Ideas practice question

The following text is from a novel. Each winter Ines wrote to her brother in Canada, and each spring his reply came, and for thirty years the letters grew shorter on both sides, until hers were a single page and his a card, and then, one spring, nothing came, and she found that what she missed was not the card but the writing of the letter, which had been, she now saw, the only conversation in which she had ever said what she meant.