with being beautiful and becoming
beautiful--not in mocking or despising or finding fault or improving. Love
is the finding your friend beautiful in mind and heart, and the joy of
being loved is the sense that you are beautiful to him--that you are equal
in that! When you once know that, little quarrels and frictions do not
matter--what _does_ matter is the recognising of some ugly thing which
the man whom you thought was your friend really clings to and worships.
Faults do not matter if only the friend is aware of them, and ashamed of
them: it is the self-conscious fault, proud of its power to wound, and
using affection as the channel along which the envenomed stream may flow,
which destroys affection and trust."

"Then it comes to this," I said, "that affection is a mutual recognition of
beauty and a sense of equality?"

"It _is_ that, more or less, I believe," said Father Payne. "I don't
mean that friends need be aware of that--you need not philosophise about
your friendships--but if you ask me, as an analyst, what it all consists
in, I believe that those are the essential elements of it--and I believe
that it holds good of the dog-and-man friendship as well!"

XLVII

OF RESPECT OF PERSONS

Father Payne had been out to luncheon one day with some neighbours. He had
groaned over the prospect the day before, and had complained that such
goings-on unsettled him.

"Well, Father," said Rose at dinner, "so you have got through your ordeal!
Was it very bad?"

"Bad!" said Father Payne, "why should it be bad? I'm crammed with
impressions--I'm a perfect mine of them."

"But you didn't like the prospect of going?" said Rose.

"No," said Father Payne, "I shrank from the strain--you phlegmatic,
aristocratic people,--men-of-the-world, blases, highly-born and
highly-placed,--have no conception of the strain these things are on a
child of nature. You are used to such things, Rose, no doubt--you do not
anticipate a luncheon-party with a mixture of curiosity and gloom. But it
is good for me to go to such affairs--it is like a waterbreak in a
stream--it aerates and agitates the mind. But _you_ don't realise the
amount of observation I bring to bear on such an event--the strange house,
the unfamiliar food, the new inscrutable people--everything has to be
observed, dealt with, if possible accounted for, and if unaccountable, then
inflexibly faced and recollected. A torrent of impressions has poured in
upon me--to say noth