“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: