“That would be by the law of compensation,” said I. “And it would require a great deal of fire and sunshine in her early life to compensate any one who had grown into an old lady and had run out of it.”
“So it would,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “Now, when you grow old—though you will never be that which is called an old lady—you will be quite mellow. And probably the less you have to be mellow over, the mellower you will be.”
“I don’t wish to be that way,” said I. “I think that kind of person is pitiful, living year after year.”
“You’ll not be pitiful,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “You can not be mellow and pitiful at the same time. It may be that to be mellow is the best thing, and the most comfortable. It maybe that people struggle through a long life with but one object in their minds—to be mellow in their old age. This verse certainly sounds as if you were looking forward to it.”
“I can’t see that it sounds that way, at all,” said I.
“Of course you can’t,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “You wrote the verse, and you are but you.”
“And what are some of the other things that it betrays?” I inquired.
“It betrays,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “that you are better in detail than you are in the entire. And if that is true of you in one thing it is true of you in everything. I daresay your friends find things in you that they like extremely, but you in the entire they look upon as something that has much to acquire.”
“Not my friends?” said I.
“Yes, your friends,” said my friend Annabel Lee.