THE MOTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE
_By_
H*NRY J*M*S
It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that
he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without
compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left
it. But just where the deuce _had_ he left it? The consciousness of
dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut
enough to outline the figures on what she had called his "horizon,"
between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality
somewhat intimidating. He had run up, in the course of time, against
a good number of "teasers;" and the function of teasing them back--of,
as it were, giving them, every now and then, "what for"--was in him so
much a habit that he would have been at a loss had there been, on the
face of it, nothing to lose. Oh, he always had offered rewards, of
course--had ever so liberally pasted the windows of his soul with
staring appeals, minute descriptions, promises that knew no bounds.
But the actual recovery of the article--the business of drawing and
crossing the cheque, blotched though this were with tears of joy--had
blankly appeared to him rather in the light of a sacrilege, casting,
he sometimes felt, a palpable chill on the fervour of the next quest.
It was just this fervour that was threatened as, raising himself on
his elbow, he stared at the foot of his bed. That his eyes refused
to rest there for more than the fraction of an instant, may be
taken--_was_, even then, taken by Keith Tantalus--as a hint of his
recollection that after all the phenomenon wasn't to be singular. Thus
the exact repetition, at the foot of Eva's bed, of the shape pendulous
at the foot of _his_ was hardly enough to account for the fixity with
which he envisaged it, and for which he was to find, some years later,
a motive in the (as it turned out) hardly generous fear that Eva had
already made the great investigation "on her own." Her very regular
breathing presently reassured him that, if she _had_ peeped into "her"
stocking, she must have done so in sleep. Whether he should wake her
now, or wait for their nurse to wake them both in due course, was
a problem presently solved by a new development. It was plain that
his sister was now watching him between her eyelashes. He had half
expected that. She really was--he had often told her that she really
was--magnificent; and her magnificence was never more obvious than in
the pause that elapsed before she all of a sudden remarked "They so
very indubitably _are_, you know!"
It occurred to him as befitting Eva's remoteness, which was a part
of Eva's magnificence, that her voice emerged somewhat muffled by the
bedclothes. She was ever, indeed, the most telephonic of her sex. In
talking to Eva you always had, as it were, your lips to the receiver.
If you didn't try to meet her fine eyes, it was that you simply
couldn't hope to: there were too many dark, too many buzzing 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!"
