Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/180

 ideas and fancies and material to make bitter sentences of words.

It seems to interest her, and it interests me to rare degrees.

She dwells upon the present.

She talks of things in the present with inflections of voice that are in sharp contrast to the sentiments she utters. The while the expression of her face is inscrutable. Taken by and large, she is an inscrutable person. I wonder while I listen, does she herself believe these things?—or is she talking to amuse herself? But perforce I feel a vein of truth in each thing that she says. I look hard at her to discover signs of irony or insincerity—but I can but feel a vein of rancorous truth, or a vein of friendly truth, or a vein of ancient truth, or curious.

Then, as she is talking and in the same moment I am wondering, I consider: What matters it whether or not any of it