and bewildering and all frankly not negotiable leagues in between.  Snatches of other voices seemed often to intertrude themselves in the parley; and your loyal effort not to overhear these was complicated by your fear of missing what Eva might be twittering.  “Oh, you certainly haven’t, my dear, the trick of propinquity!” was a thrust she had once parried by saying that, in that case, he hadn’t—­to which his unspoken rejoinder that she had caught her tone from the peevish young women at the Central seemed to him (if not perhaps in the last, certainly in the last but one, analysis) to lack finality.  With Eva, he had found, it was always safest to “ring off.”  It was with a certain sense of his rashness in the matter, therefore, that he now, with an air of feverishly “holding the line,” said “Oh, as to that!”

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?”