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 backȔof, as it were, giving them, every now and then, what forȔwas 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 courseȔhad 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 articleȔthe business of drawing and crossing the cheque, blotched though this were with tears of joyȔhad 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 takenȔwas, even then, taken by Keith TantalusȔas a hint of his recollection that after all the phenomenon wasnt to be singular. Thus the exact repetition, at the foot of Evas 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 wasȔhe had often told her that she really wasȔmagnificent; 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 Evas remoteness, which was a part of Evas 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 didnt try to meet her fine eyes, it was that you simply couldnt 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....