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254 she wanted to be prepared for anything. . . but what. . . what would it be? And these haunting terrors which gathered around her so menacingly, like a gloomy twilight, with all those ghostly premonitions and presentiments of what was coming, was it because the days themselves were so gloomy, because it was always raining out of fateful skies? Why should there be deeper gloom around her soul in these days than around others, perhaps hundreds and thousands of people? Was it not the reflection of that gloomy winter in and around her and was not that reflection casting its gloom around all the people who were now, like herself, walking under dripping umbrellas or else, like spectres, looking with pallid faces out of their windows at another dark and dreary day? . . . Oh, how vast, how immense it all was and how small were they all! To think that, if the sun happened to shine, she would perhaps think and feel quite differently! To think that possibly she was divining, with a shudder, something of days and things to come and went flying off to distant cloud-lands, to all. . . and that possibly she was divining nothing! . . . How ready people were to play with their emotions, their sensitiveness! How ready they were to delude themselves that they had seen invisible things, that they had foretold the most profound secrets! . . . No, she could foretell nothing, she saw nothing invisible. . . but still, argue as