“You could never look like any one else so it doesn’t matter.”

“And yet I spend two-thirds of my time trying to extinguish the little individuality I possess,” laughed Gerty, as she turned upon the threshold.  “I wear the same wave in my hair, the same colour in my gown, the same length to my gloves.  Oh, you fortunate dear, thank heaven you have never kept a fashion!”

She went out with her softened merriment, while Laura, throwing herself into the chair beside the window, looked down upon the carriage which was waiting before the door.  After a moment she saw Gerty come out and cross the sidewalk, lifting her velvet skirt until she showed a beautifully shod foot and a glimpse of black embroidered stocking.  She gave a few careless directions to the footman who arranged her rugs, and then as the carriage door closed, she leaned out with her brilliant smile and waved her hand to Laura at the window above.  The winter sunlight seemed to pass away with her when at last she turned the corner.

With a sigh Laura’s thoughts followed the carriage, envying the beauty and the fashion of her friend for the first time in her life.  A strange fascination enveloped the world in which Gerty lived, and the old familiar atmosphere through which she herself had moved so tranquilly was troubled suddenly as if by an 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.