congenial tastes. They must further have enough community of occupation
and gifts to give each an appreciation of the other's faculty; for
qualities are not complementary unless they are qualities of the same
substance. Nothing must be actual in either friend that is not potential
in the other.

[Sidenote: Identity in sex required.]

For this reason, among others, friends are generally of the same sex,
for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their
reasons are always different. So that while intellectual harmony between
men and women is easily possible, its delightful and magic quality lies
precisely in the fact that it does not arise from mutual understanding,
but is a conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in the
dark. As man's body differs from woman's in sex and strength, so his
mind differs from hers in quality and function: they can co-operate but
can never fuse. The human race, in its intellectual life, is organised
like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and
essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is
a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but
passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without
justice. Friendship with a woman is therefore apt to be more or less
than friendship: less, because there is no intellectual parity; more,
because (even when the relation remains wholly dispassionate, as in
respect to old ladies) there is something mysterious and oracular about
a woman's mind which inspires a certain instinctive deference and puts
it out of the question to judge what she says by masculine standards.
She has a kind of sibylline intuition and the right to be irrationally
_a propos_. There is a gallantry of the mind which pervades all
conversation with a lady, as there is a natural courtesy toward children
and mystics; but such a habit of respectful concession, marking as it
does an intellectual alienation as profound as that which separates us
from the dumb animals, is radically incompatible with friendship.

[Sidenote: and in age.]

Friends, moreover, should have been young together. Much difference in
age defeats equality and forbids frankness on many a fundamental
subject; it confronts two minds of unlike focus: one near-sighted and
without perspective, the other seeing only the background of present
things. While comparisons in these respects may be interesti