“She who was like Cleopatra and Peg of Limmavaddy is teaching a school, according to the last that I heard, in the north of Montana; and she that was Emancipated Eva has long since gone to California, and is married, and keeps a house; and for me--I am here, far off from Butte, with you, Annabel Lee, some things having been done meanwhile. “But though the two are gone, I warrant they have not forgotten. They have not forgotten the Butte High School, nor the class of ninety-nine, nor the tramps we went, nor their tyrant, me. “And I daresay they all remember their Butte High School--she of the love-letters, she of the whiskey-flask, she the student of Albert Ross, she of the profanity, she of the malice, The Shad,--and all the nine-and-fifty, the young feminine persons and the young masculine persons. Some are married, and some are flown, and some of them are grown up and different, ‘and some of them in the churchyard lie, and some are gone to sea.’ “But whenever I’ve a fancy to shut my eyes and look back, I can see them all, a quaint company. “Also, whenever I’ve a fancy to shut my eyes and look back to life when it was unspeakably brilliant in possibilities to look forward to, and was marked in parti-colored checks and rings, it fetches me to the days when I went to the Butte High School and studied geometry and Vergil. Only I’m glad I’m not there now.” “What for?” said my friend Annabel Lee. “It is rather pitiful and dreadful to think of having been seventeen, and to have gone every day to the Butte High School and imagined how wonderful-beautiful life would be some day,” said I, and all at once felt very weary. XIV “AND MARY MACLANE AND ME” There are times in a number of days when my friend Annabel Lee and I enjoy a cigarette together. My friend Annabel Lee, with her cigarette, her petite much-colored form wrapped round in clouds of thin, exquisite gray, is more than all suggestive and inscrutable. She leans her two elbows on something and looks out at me. I with my cigarette am nothing but I with my cigarette. I enjoy it, but am not beautiful with it, nor fascinating. But my friend Annabel Lee is all that my imagination can take in. Under the influence of the thin, exquisite gray she grows fanciful, and subtly and indefinitely she meets me somewhere, and extends me her hand for a moment. “Don’t you know,” said my friend Annabel Lee, with her cigarette, “that old song that goes: ‘Mary Seaton, And Mary Beaton, And Mary Carmichael, And me’? I think it is Mary Stuart of Scotland who says that. And a fair good song it is. But just now, for _me_, if I were Mary Stuart of Scotland, you poor miserable little rat, I should say: ‘Mary MacLane, And Mary MacLane, And Mary MacLane, And me.’ For aren’t we two together here, calmly smoking--and doesn’t the world spin round?”