and beneath these tiled colonnades, to hear these fountains
singing under orange trees, to see these far stretches of turquoise and
deep blue water, to watch Arabs on white roads passing noiselessly by
night under a Heaven thick with stars, and to know "He is not here and I
am nothing to him!"

Charmian's romantic tendency, her sense of, and desire for, wonder were
violently stirred by the new surroundings. She was painfully affected.
She began to feel almost desperate. That terrible sensation, known
perhaps in its frightening nightmare fulness only to youth, "My life is
done, all real life is at an end for me, because I cannot be linked with
my other half, because I have found it, but it has not found me!"
besieged, assailed her. It shook her, as neurasthenia shakes its victim,
squeezing as if with fierce and powerful hands till the blood seems to
be driven out of the arteries. It changed the world for her, making of
beauty a phenomenon to terrify. She looked at loveliness, and it sent a
lacerating ache all through her, because only the half looked at it and
not the whole, some hideous astral shape, not the joyous, powerful body
meant for the life of this splendid world, at home in the atmosphere
specially created for it. She began to be frightened and to think, "But
what can I do? How will it end?" She longed to do something active, to
make an exertion, and struggle out of all this assailing strangeness.
Like one attacked in a tunnel by claustrophobia, she had an impulse to
dash open doors and windows, to burst arching, solid walls, and to be
elsewhere.

At first she carefully concealed her condition from Susan Fleet, but
when three days had gone by, and no word came from Mrs. Shiffney, she
began to feel that fate had left her alone with the one human being of
whom she could make a confidante. Again and again she looked furtively
at Miss Fleet's serene and practical face, and wondered what effect her
revelation would have upon the very sensible personality it indicated.
"She'll think it is all nonsense, that it doesn't matter at all!"
thought Charmian. And more than ever she wanted to tell Miss Fleet. In
self-restraint she became violently excited. Often she felt on the verge
of tears. And at last, very suddenly and without premeditation, she
spoke.

They were visiting "Djenan el Ali," the lovely villa of an acquaintance
of Mrs. Shiffney's who was away in Europe. Miss Fleet had been there
before and knew the servan