XVII
A Lute With No Strings
THE most astonishing thing about my friend Annabel Lee is that, young as she is, she seems except for some thing in the past to be absolutely in the present. She does not build up for herself things in the future. The future is a thing she looks upon with contempt. She has not a use for it—except perhaps to help form a bitter sentence of words.
The present she finds before her, and she lifts it up and places it upon a table before her and opens it as if it were a book—a book with but two pages. She seems to find symbols and figures and faint suggestions upon these two pages from which she derives a multitude of
