“A triumph?--a victory!” said my friend Annabel Lee--with still more curious expressions. “And the victories are not what this world sees”--which reminded me of things I used to hear in Sunday-school ever so many years ago. “You remember the story of the Ten Virgins? Taking the story literally,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “the lot of the five Foolish Virgins is much the more fortunate. There was a rare measure of bitterness for them when they found themselves without oil for their lamps at a time when oil was needed. They gained infinitely more than they lost. As for the five Wise Virgins--well, _I_ wouldn’t have been one of them under _any_ circumstances,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “Fancy the miserable, mean, mindless, imaginationless, selfish natures that could remain unmoved by the simplicity of the appeal, ‘Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out.’ It must now,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “be a hundred times bitterer for them to think of being handed down in endless history as demons of selfishness--and they are now where they can not, presumably, measure their bitterness by milestones of progress.” “So then, yes,” said my friend Annabel Lee--“whatever else you may do as you go through life, remember to save up your gratitude for the bitternesses you have known--and remember that for _you_ the bitterest is yet to come.” “Have _you_, Annabel Lee,” I asked, “already known the bitterest that can come--and can _you_ sit with your hands folded in the midst of a burning house?” “Not I!” said my friend Annabel Lee, and laughed gayly. Again I looked hard at her--and she looked back at me. Certainly there are times when my friend Annabel Lee is like a stone wall. XII TO FALL IN LOVE “I loved madly,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “There came one down out of the north country that was dark and strong and brave and full of life’s fire. All my short life had been bathed in summer. I had dreamed my thirteen years beneath cherry-blossoms upon a high hill. “But at the coming of this man from the north country I opened my two sloe-eyes, and the world turned white--exquisite, rapturous, divine white. “And afterward all was heavy gray. “Away from the high hill of the cherry-blossoms there lay a stretch of red barren waste with towering rocks--and beyond that a quiet, quiet sea that was only blue. “At the left of the high hill of the cherry-blossoms there was a mountain covered with green ivy--dark green ivy that defined its own green shape against the brilliant yellow sky behind it. Green and yellow, green and yellow, green and yellow, said the sky and the mountain covered with ivy. “The high hill of the cherry-blossoms was colored with all the colors of Japan. “I lived there with people--my mother and my father and some others--all with pale faces and sloe-eyes. “But some of them were very ugly. “Then came one down out of the north country that was dark and strong and brave and full of life’s fire.