n approaching storm. The things which
she had once loved now showed stale and profitless to her eyes, while
those external objects of fortune, to which she had always believed
herself to be indifferent, were endowed at the moment with an
extraordinary and unreal value. It was as if her whole nature had
undergone some powerful physical convulsion, which had altered not only
her outward sensibilities but the obscure temperamental forces which
controlled in her the laws of attraction and repulsion. What she had
liked yesterday she was frankly wearied of to-day. What she had formerly
hated she now found to be full of a mysterious charm. Books bored her,
and her mind, in spite of her effort at restraint, dwelt longingly upon
the trivial details which made up Gerty's life--upon those bodily
adornments on which her friend had staked her chance of married
happiness. The endless round of dressmakers, shops, and feverish
emulation appeared strangely full of interest; and her own quiet life
showed to her as utterly destitute of that illusory colour of romance
which she found in her vision of Gerty's and of every other existence
except her own. She beheld her friend moving in a whirl of colour,
through perpetual laughter, and the picture fascinated her, though she
knew that in the naked reality of things Gerty was far more unhappy than
she herself. Yet Gerty's unhappiness appeared to her to be distinguished
by the element of poetry in which her own was lacking.

A terrible _ennui_ possessed her, the restless desire for a change that
would obliterate not only the circumstances in which she was placed, but
even the personal fact of her own identity. She wanted an experience so
fresh that it would be like a new birth--a resurrection--and yet she
could tell neither what this experience would be nor why she wanted it.
All that she was clearly aware of was that her surroundings, her family,
her friends, the small daily events of her life and her own
dissatisfaction, had become stale and repugnant to her mood, and she
thought of the day before her as of a gray waste of utterly intolerable
hours.

"Nothing will happen in it that has not happened every twenty-four hours
since I was born," she said; "it is always the same--everything is the
same, and it is this monotony that seems to me insupportable. As I sit
here at this window I feel it to be impossible that I should ever drag
myself through the remainder of this afternoon, and through t