ring pleasures we enjoy are those we give.
It should always be remembered, that, while the proud demand honor,
and the humble seek sympathy, there is a self-respectful affection,
neither haughty nor cringing, which will always earn honor, but never
stop to ask it, always enjoy sympathy, but never be dependent on it.
This whole book is a demonstration of the truth, that, however much
woman may need deliverance from some outward trials and disabilities,
her grand want is a freer, deeper, richer, holier, inward life. Let
her, if she so please, reach out for the ballot, enter on a larger
range of work and responsibility. But let her not be blind to the
truth, that her foremost, weightiest need is a more thorough
intellectual possession and moral fulfilment of herself, leading to a
closer union with friends and an absolute surrender to God. The just
formula for the aims of woman, as it seems to me, is neither, on the
one hand, limitation to domestic life; nor, on the other hand,
devotion to public life as an end; but, dedication to the duties and
joys of family and social life, and to the nurture of the personal
inner life, as the true ends, and a free participation in the grand
interests of public life, as a means of purifying the domestic and
the inner life from selfish littlenesses, and enriching the
experience of the individual with the wide obligations and hopes of
humanity at large. Not domestic life alone; not public life alone;
not merely domestic life and public life together; but domestic life
and public life, for the sake of the personal inner life, purified
and aggrandized by the ideal appropriation of the essential
experience and progress of the whole world.

This, with such allowances as the distinction of sex really requires,
should be the aim of every woman as well as of every man. If this
view be correct, it is plain how great and vital an interest it gives
to the theme of the present work; the friendship of women; since the
very ground and gist of a noble friendship is the cultivation in
common of the personal inner lives of those who partake in it, their
mutual reflection of souls and joint sharing of experience inciting
them to a constant betterment of their being and their happiness.

HAVE WOMEN NO FRIENDSHIPS?

SOME men think women unfitted for friendship. Feminine hearts are so
complex, changeable, elusive, that the belief has had great currency
among themselves as well as with their critics. In com