It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life, when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation, when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing, my wish that Gilberte would love me.