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 the 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.