Could Mary Magdalene herself—she of the Bible—be among those who sit watching, she would surely marvel and admire.
Meanwhile, for myself, I have two visions of this Mary Magdalene.
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.”