he evening
which will be like every other evening that I have spent. Aunt Rosa
will repeat her exhaustless jokes, Aunt Angela will make her old
complaints, Uncle Percival will begin to play upon his flute." And these
things when she thought of them--the stories of Mrs. Payne, the despair
of Angela, the piping of Uncle Percival's flute--appeared to her to
exact a power of moral endurance which she felt herself no longer to
possess. A disgust more terrible than grief seized upon her--a revolt
from the commonplace which she knew to be worse than tragedy.

Then in the midst of her depression she remembered that on the following
afternoon she would see Arnold Kemper, and the hours appeared instantly
to open into the light. The end of everything was there just twenty-four
hours ahead, and she felt, like a physical agony, the necessity to
stifle the consciousness of time, to kill the minutes, one by one, as
they crept slowly into sight. She thought of the meeting in this very
room, of the gown that she would wear, of the words that she would
speak, of the curious exquisite mixture of attraction and repulsion, of
the ardent tenderness she would find in his look. This tenderness, she
felt, was the solitary expression of the real man--of the man whom Gerty
had never known, whom Madame Alta had not so much as glimpsed; and the
assurance produced in her a secret rapture which was all the sweeter for
being exclusively her own. She wondered where he was at the instant--how
he would pass the hours which dragged so heavily for her--and the
interest which had vanished so strangely from her own existence attached
itself immediately to his. The people he knew, the club he went to,
even the motor cars he drove, were surrounded in her thoughts with a
fresh and vivid charm. Apart from this there was no longer any
charm--hardly any animation about the life she led. A single idea had
enlarged itself at the cost of all the others, and she had a sense of
standing amid a desert waste, in the drab miles of which a solitary
palm-tree flourished.

"And yet why should I hunger for his presence and what is there in it
when it comes that is worth this wanting?" she asked in dismay of her
own longing. "When I am away from him I think of nothing except of the
hour when I shall see him again, and yet when the meeting comes I am not
happy and he is always a little different from what I hoped that he
would be. I have no particular satisfaction when I see h