it is
generally the other way, and the best friendships are most often those
that seem at first sight dully made for us by habit and proximity, and
which reveal to us by slow degrees their beauty and their worth.

* * * * * *

Thus far had I written, when it came into my mind that I should like to
see the reflection of my beliefs in some other mind, to submit them to
the test of what I may perhaps be forgiven for calling a spirit-level!
And so I read my essay to two wise, kindly, and gracious ladies, who
have themselves often indeed graduated in friendship, and taken the
highest honours. I will say nothing of the tender courtesy with which
they made their head-breaking balms precious; I told them that I had not
finished my essay, and that before I launched upon my last antistrophe,
I wanted inspiration. I cannot here put down the phrases they used, but
I felt that they spoke in symbols, like two initiated persons, for whom
the corn and the wine and the oil of the sacrifice stand for very
secret and beautiful mysteries; but they said in effect that I had
been depicting, and not untruly, the outer courts and corridors of
friendship. What they told me of the inner shrine I shall presently
describe; but when I asked them to say whether they could tell me
instances of the best and highest kind of friendship, existing and
increasing and perfecting itself between two men, or between a man and a
woman, not lovers or wedded, they found a great difficulty in doing so.
We sifted our common experiences of friendships, and we could find but
one or two such, and these had somewhat lost their bloom. It came then
to this: that in the emotional region, many women, but very few men, can
form the highest kind of tie; and we agreed that men tended to find what
they needed in marriage, because they were rather interested in than
dependent upon personal emotion, and because practical life, as the
years went on--the life of causes, and movements, and organisations,
and ideas, and investigations--tended to absorb the energies of men; and
that they found their emotional life in home ties; and that the man who
lived for emotional relations would tend to be thought, if not to be, a
sentimentalist; but that the real secret lay with women, and with men
of perhaps a feminine fibre. And all this was transfused by a kind of
tender pity, without any touch of complacency or superiority, such as a
mother m