XXI
A Bond of Sympathy
HAVING told me stories, my friend Annabel Lee demanded that I should write a bit of verse to read to her.
My verse is rather rotten verse, and I told her so. She replied that the fact of its being rotten had but little to do with the matter, that most verse was rotten, anyway, and usually the more rotten the better it suited the reader.
She was in that mood.
So I wrote some lines and read them to her—there was nothing else to do. She had been kind in telling me stories, though probably she told them because it amused her. When I finished reading, she said that the verse was not rotten at
