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.
It's a cathedral, it's a herd of elephants, it's the whole habitable
globe. Oh, it's, believe me, of an obsessiveness!" But his sense of
the one thing it _didn't_ block out from his purview enabled him
to launch at Eva a speculation as to just how far Santa Claus had,
for the particular occasion, gone. The gauge, for both of them,
of this seasonable distance seemed almost blatantly suspended in
the silhouettes of the two stockings. Over and above the basis of
(presumably) sweetmeats in the toes and heels, certain extrusions
stood for a very plenary fulfilment of desire. And, since Eva had set
her heart on a doll of ample proportions and practicable eyelids--had
asked that most admirable of her sex, their mother, for it with not
less directness than he himself had put into his demand for a sword
and helmet--her coyness now struck Keith as lying near to, at indeed
a hardly measurable distance from, the border-line of his patience. If
she didn't want the doll, why the deuce had she made such a point of
getting it? He was perhaps on the verge of putting this question to
her, when, waving her hand to include both stockings, she said "Of
course, my dear, you _do_ see. There they are, and you know I know
you know we wouldn't, either of us, dip a finger into them." With a
vibrancy of tone that seemed to bring her voice quite close to him,
"One doesn't," she added, "violate the shrine--pick the pearl from the
shell!"