IX
Relative
"DO YOU think, Annabel Lee," I said to her on a day that I felt depressed, "that all things must really be relative, and that those which are not now properly relative will eventually become so, though it gives them acute anguish?"
The face of Annabel Lee was placid, and also the sea. The one glanced down upon me from the shelf, and the other spread away into the distance.
Were that face and that sea relative? Surely they could not be, since those two things in their very nature might go ungoverned. Do not universal laws, in extreme moments, give way?
"Relative!" said Annabel Lee. "Noth-
