“I’ve no intention of saying it,” said I.
“You will find,” said my friend Annabel Lee—without noticing my interruption, and with curious expressions in her voice and upon her two red lips—“you will find that these bitternesses come from time to time in your life, like so many milestones. They are useful as such—for of course you like to take measurements along the road, now and again, to see what progress you have made. Along some parts of the road you will find your progress wonderful. If you are appreciative and grateful, at the last milestone you have come to thus far you will express your measure of gratitude to the kind fates. That is, no—” said my friend Annabel Lee, “you will not do this at the milestone, but after you have passed it and have turned a corner, and so can not see it even when you look back.”
“But why shall I express gratitude there?” I inquired in a tone that must have been rather lifeless.
“Why?” repeated my friend Annabel Lee. “Because you will have grown in strength on account of these milestones; because you will have learned to take all things tranquilly. Why, after the very last milestone I daresay you would be able to sit with folded hands if a house were burning up about your ears!”
“Which must indeed be a triumph,” said I.
“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.