riendship we have infinitely the advantage."

With reference to the statement that "Orestes and Pylades have no
sisters," besides the superfluous disproofs of it contained in the
pages that follow, it is an interesting fact that classic literature
affords one example, which modern writers have never, to my
knowledge, noticed. Pausanias, in his "Description of Greece," tenth
book, twenty-ninth chapter, gives an recount of an elaborate painting
by Polygnotus of the underworld, the scenery and fate of the dead in
the future state. Among the images of the departed set forth on the
canvas were two women, Chloris and rhyia, locked in a fond embrace.
Of these two women, thus shown eternally united in the realm beyond
he grave, Pausanias says that they were a pair of friends
extraordinarily attached to each other in life. Their story is lost.
The imagination of womankind might compensate for the missing
narrative, and make the names of Chloris and Thyia live with the
lames of Damon and Pythias.

Let us sift the grounds of the opinion that women ire relatively
incapable of friendship, analyze the appearances on which it rests,
and separate the truth in it from the error.

The first fact of the subject is, that women are naturally less
selfish and more sympathetic than men.

They have more affection to bestow, greater need of sympathy, and
therefore are more sure, in the absence of love, to seek friendship.
The devastating egotism of man is properly foreign to woman; though
there are many women as haughty, hard, and imperious as any man. But
these are unfeminine, despite their sex. There are women who seem
cold and beautiful stones, their hearts icicles, their tears frozen
gems pressed out by injured pride. On the other hand, there are men
as soft, as modest, as celestially sympathetic, as almost any woman.
Still, the cardinal contrast holds, that women are self-forgetful,
men self-asserting; women hide their surplus affection under a
feigned indifference; men hide their indifference under a feigned
affection. Of course, in this comparison, depraved women are
excluded: these are generally far more heartless and calculating than
men. The aphorism of Rochefoucauld "In their first passion, women
love the lover; in their subsequent ones, they love love" is
descriptive, not of women, but of that class of women who cherish a
succession of lovers, a class familiar to the base and brilliant
French aphorist. With such, the venal comm