lready has;
the truest adding to all wealth, the most fruitful act of
production;--that is one of the privileges of old friendships.

OTHER FRIENDSHIPS

It came home to me, during that week of grim and sordid business in the
old house, feeling so solitary among the ghosts of unkind passions which
seemed, like the Wardour Street ancestors, to fill the place--it came
home to me what consolation there can be in the friendship of one small
corner of grace or beauty. During those dreary days in Scotland, the
friendliness and consolation were given me by the old kitchen garden,
with its autumn flower borders, half hiding apple trees and big cabbages
and rhubarbs, and the sheep-dotted hill, and the beeches sloping above
its red fruit walls. I slipped away morning and evening to it as to a
friend. Not as to an old one; that would give a different aspect to the
matter; nor yet exactly a new friend, conquering or being conquered; but
rather as one turns one's thoughts, if not one's words, to some
nameless stranger, casually met, in whom one recognizes, among the
general wilderness of alien creatures, a quality, a character for which
one cares.

Travelling a good deal, and nearly always alone, one has occasion to
gauge the deep dreariness of human beings pure and simple, when, so to
speak, the small, learnt-by-rote lessons of civilization, of kindness,
graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by common
business or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in the
elemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious demand
on life; not bad in any way, oh no; nor actively repulsive, but trite,
empty, _everyday_, in the sense of what _everyday_ often, alas! really
is, but certainly no day or hour or minute, in a decent universe, should
ever be. And suddenly a new traveller gets in; and, turning round, you
realize that things are changed, that something from another planet, and
yet something quite right and so familiar, has entered. A young man
shabbily dressed in mourning, who got in at a junction in Northern
France with a small girl, like him in mourning, and like him pale, a
little washed-out ashy blond, and with the inexpressible moral grace
which French folk sometimes have, will always remain in my memory; while
all those fellow-travellers and all the others--hundreds of them since
that day--have faded from my memory, their images collapsing into each
other, a grey monotony as of t