One--in one of the acts wherein her eyes do hunger and thirst after righteousness--when she sits before a small table and lifts her pathetic, sweet voice with the words, “When the dawn breaks, and the darkness shall flee away”; and then she stands and the red hair is equally pathetic and twofold bewitching, and she says again, “When the dawn breaks, and the darkness shall flee away.” And the other vision is of her in the country in the midst of a summer day, under a summer sky, swinging high and recklessly in a barrel-stave hammock. XI LIKE A STONE WALL My friend Annabel Lee has told me there are bitterer things in store for me than I have known yet. Times I have wondered what they can be. “When you have come to them,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “they will be so bitter and will fit so well into your life that you will wonder that you did not always know about them, and you will wonder why you did not always have them.” “The bitterest things I have known yet,” I said, “have had to do with the varying friendship of one or another whom I have loved.” “Varying friendship?” said Annabel Lee. “But friendship does not vary.” “No, that is true,” I rejoined. “I mean the varying deception I have had from some whom I have loved.” “In time,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “you will love more, and your deceiving will be all at once, and bitterer. It will be a rich experience.” “Why rich?” I inquired. “Because from it,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “you will learn to not see too much, to not start out with faith, in fact, to take the goods that the gods provide and endeavor to be thankful for them. Your other experiences have been poverty-stricken in that respect. They leave you with rays of hope, without which you would be better off. They are poor and bitter. What is to come will be rich and bitterer. Their bitterness will prevent you from appreciating the richness of them--until perhaps years have come and taken them from immediately before your eyes. As soon as they are where you can not see them, you can consider them and appreciate their richness.” “Whatever they may be,” I made answer, “I do not think I shall ever be able to appreciate their richness.” “Then you will be very ungrateful,” said my friend Annabel Lee. I looked hard at her--and she looked back at me. There are times when my friend Annabel Lee is much like a stone wall.