That got me nothing, because it changed the rules. The alternate nothing. The most insidious nothing is the relegation to nothing of all things bewildering. The discounted nothings. Now I know that there was even more that I didn't know then than I ever suspected then.
String is elastic, it can stretch.
That's where the droop came from. I knew that rubber bands were elastic, the only elastic things that existed, all I could stretch. Any fool knew that a string couldn't be stretched. It wasn't a matter of elasticity at all. It never entered my head.