her numerous admirers
would break up a very pleasant circle, and put an end to some charming
conversations. On the other hand, the quiet sense of some special
relationship, the faint odor of a passion carefully sealed up, gives a
piquancy and flavor to social friendship which mere association wants.
Very frequently such a relation forms an admirable retreat from stormier
experiences in the past, and the tender grace of a day that is dead
hangs pleasantly enough over the days that remain.

But the Platonic woman proper, in this sense, is the spinster of
five-and-thirty. She is clever enough to know that the day for inspiring
grand passions is gone by, but that there is still nothing ridiculous in
mingling a little sentiment with her friendly relations. She moves in
maiden meditation fancy free, but the vestal flame of her life is none
the more sullied for a slight tinge of earthly color. It is a connection
that is at once interesting, undefined, and perfectly safe. It throws a
little poetry over life to know that one being is cherishing a perfectly
moral and carefully toned-down attachment for another, which will last
for years, but never exceed the bounds of a smile and a squeeze of the
hand.

Animals in the lowest scale of life are notoriously the hardest to kill,
and it is just this low vitality, as it were, of Platonic attachment
that makes it so perfectly indestructible. Its real use is in keeping up
a sort of minute irrigation of a good deal of human ground which would
be barren without it. These little tricklings of affection, so small as
not to disturb one's sleep or to drive one to compose a single sonnet,
keep up a certain consciousness of attraction, and beget a corresponding
return of kindliness and good temper towards the world around. A woman
who has once given up the hope of being loved is a nuisance to
everybody. But the Platonic woman need never give up her hope of being
loved; she has reduced affection to a minimum, but from its very
minuteness there is little or no motive to snap the bond, and with time
habit makes it indestructible.

One Christian body, we believe--the Moravians--still carries out the
principle of Plato's ideal state in giving woman no choice in the
selection of a spouse. The elders arrange their matches as the wise men
of the Republic were wont to do. A friend of ours once met six young
women going out to some Northern settlement of the Moravians with a view
to marriage. "What is