. As less strong, less stably poised, than he, she is more
tempted to have recourse to artifice; and when she does stoop to
dissimulation, she uses it with inimitable dexterity, as shield, as
foil, as poniard. It would be a difficult task for men to do what the
spotless and loving Eugenie de Guerin was horrified at seeing two
prominent Parisian ladies do, play the part of tender friends in
society, and then turn away and venomously caricature each other.
What woman who possessed a ring conferring invisibility on its
wearer, would dare to put it on, and move about among her friends?
The weakness of women is an exaggerated attention to trifles. The
great condition of steady friendship is community of plans and ends
in the parties. This is much wanting in women, who think chiefly of
persons, little of laborious aims. Two girls, who live in a multitude
of evaporating impulses and dreams it were as easy to yoke a couple
of humming-birds, and make them draw. Because the polarity of a grand
fixed purpose is absent from it, the mind of many a woman is a heap
of petty antipathies; and, where the likings are fickle, the
dislikings are pretty sure to be tenacious. A keen student of human
nature has remarked, that many women "spend force enough in trivial
observations on dress and manners, to form a javelin to pierce quite
through a character." Women's eyes are armed with microscopes to see
all the little defects and dissimilarities which can irritate and
injure their friendships. Hence there are so many feminine friends
easily provoked to mutual criticisms and recriminations.

The dear friends, Fanny Squeers and Matilda Price, experienced a
violent jealousy on account of Nicholas Nickleby. After a fierce
altercation, they fell into tears, followed by remonstrances and an
explanation, and terminated by embraces and by vows of eternal
friendship; "the occasion making the fifty-second time of repeating
the same impressive ceremony within a twelvemonth." But obviously it
is a closer approach to the truth to take the sensitiveness and
interruptions in the mutual relations of women, as compared with
those in the relations of men, as the direct, rather than as the
inverse, measure of the number and value of their respective
friendships. Yet, by a gross error, the estimate is usually made in
the latter way.

The maxim of Walter Savage Landor is a palpable stroke at the truth:
"No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl