t!"

Had _she_, he presently asked himself, "rung off"? It was
characteristic of our friend--was indeed "him all over"--that his fear
of what she was going to say was as nothing to his fear of what she
might be going to leave unsaid. He had, in his converse with her, been
never so conscious as now of the intervening leagues; they had never
so insistently beaten the drum of his ear; and he caught himself in
the act of awfully computing, with a certain statistical passion, the
distance between Rome and Boston. He has never been able to decide
which of these points he was psychically the nearer to at the moment
when Eva, replying "Well, one does, anyhow, leave a margin for the
pretext, you know!" made him, for the first time in his life, wonder
whether she were not more magnificent than even he had ever given
her credit for being. Perhaps it was to test this theory, or perhaps
merely to gain time, that he now raised himself to his knees, and,
leaning with outstretched arm towards the foot of his bed, made as
though to touch the stocking which Santa Claus had, overnight, left
dangling there. His posture, as he stared obliquely at Eva, with
a sort of beaming defiance, recalled to him something seen in an
"illustration." This reminiscence, however--if such it was, save in
the scarred, the poor dear old woebegone and so very beguilingly _not_
refractive mirror of the moment--took a peculiar twist from Eva's
behaviour. She had, with startling suddenness, sat bolt upright, and
looked to him as if she were overhearing some tragedy at the other end
of the wire, where, in the nature of things, she was unable to arrest
it. The gaze she fixed on her extravagant kinsman was of a kind to
make him wonder how he contrived to remain, as he beautifully did,
rigid. His prop was possibly the reflection that flashed on him that,
if _she_ abounded in attenuations, well, hang it all, so did _he_! It
was simply a difference of plane. Readjust the "values," as painters
say, and there you were! He was to feel that he was only too crudely
"there" when, leaning further forward, he laid a chubby forefinger on
the stocking, causing that receptacle to rock ponderously to and fro.
This effect was more expected than the tears which started to Eva's
eyes, and the intensity with which "Don't you," she exclaimed, "see?"

"The mote in the middle distance?" he asked. "Did you ever, my dear,
know me to see anything else? I tell you it blocks out everything.