Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/91

 If Mary Magdalene's hair were of a different color—if the bronze shadows were yellow, or gray, or black, or brown shadows—her lips and her shoulders were in vain.

On the stage Mary Magdalene stands with her back to her audience—she stands, calm and placid, for three or four minutes before the rising and falling curtain, graciously permitting all to admire and feast their eyes upon the red of her hair.

"She knows," said my friend Annabel Lee, "that she can make her face bewitching—and she knows also that her hair is bewitching without being so made. And she chooses that the world at large shall know it, too."

She has will-power, has Mary Magdalene. It is her will, her strength, her concentration of all her power to herself that makes her thus bewitching—and