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ing to find security by just holding on to one false straw after another. I prefer to hope and to trust, and, although it is a dreary philosophy, I could not, if I would, exchange it for something which is false, however wonderful and beautiful. _On Reality in People_ My one great grievance against people in the mass is that they are so very seldom real. I don't mean to say, of course, that you can walk through them like ghosts, or that, if they "gave you one straight from the shoulder," you wouldn't get a black eye. But what I mean is, that they are so very rarely their true selves; they so very rarely say what they think--or indeed think anything at all! They are so very rarely content to be merely human beings, and not some kind of walking-waxwork figure with a gramophone record inside them speaking the opinions which do not belong to them, but to some mysterious "authority" whom it is the correct thing to quote. Have you ever watched the eyes of friends talking together? I don't mean friends who are _real_ friends, friends with whom every thought is a thought shared--but the kind of familiar acquaintance who passes for a friend in polite society, and passes out of one's life as little missed in reality as an arm-chair which has gone to be repaired. In their eyes there is rarely any "answering light"--just a cold, glassy kind of surface, which says nothing and is as unsympathetic and as unfamiliar as a holland blind. You can tell by their expression that, in spite of all their apparent air of friendly familiarity, they are merely talking for talking's sake, merely being friendly for the sake of friendship; that, if they were never to see each other again, they would do so without one heartbreak. Perhaps I am unsociable, perhaps I am a bit of a misanthrope; but those kind of friends, those kind of people, bore me unutterably. I am only really happy in the society of bosom friends, or in the society of interesting strangers. The half-and-halves, the people who claim friendship because circumstances happened to have thrown you together fairly frequently--and one of us has a beautiful house and the other an excellent cook--these people press upon my spirit like a strait-waistcoat. I gabble the conventional small-talk of polite sociability, and I thank God when they are gone! They are called "friends," but we have absolutely nothing in common--not even a disease! So much polite conversation is mer
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