the context is a conversation between two resistance chiefs brought to London during the war; the narrator is amazed at the other man, who he doesn't know, who has been describing his amazement and love for the people he's worked with back in France, and their courage and spirit; one of whom is a mother and wife of a bureaucrat in Paris, whose family is undernourished, among other things; it is she to whom the reference is "silhouette dessechee"
the sentences before my question are;
Tout le monde avait quitte la table du diner et gagne un grand salon. Nous aussi. Mais je n'en avais pas eu..."