“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.
“Yes,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “if you ever feel to express proper gratitude for the good things of this life, be sure that you express your gratitude for the right thing. Very likely you will not have a great deal of gratitude, and you must not waste any of it—but what you do have will be of the most excellent quality. For it will accumulate, and the accumulation will all go to quality. And the things for which you are to be grateful are the bitternesses you have known. If you have had it in mind ever to give way to bursts of gratitude for this air that comes from off the salt sea, for that line of pearls and violets that you see just above the horizon, for the health of your body, for the sleep that comes to you at the close of the day, for any of those things, then get rid of the idea at once. Those things are quite well, but they are not really given to you. They are merely placed where any one can reach them with little effort. The kind fates don’t care whether you get them or not. Their responsibility ends when they leave them there. But the bitternesses they give to each person separately. They give you yours, Mary MacLane, for your very own. Don’t say they never think of you.”