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.
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