and attractions in school. In the first place, in school or
college the girl is brought into contact with a large circle of people
who are immensely interesting to her. The whole atmosphere is full of
novelty, of the unusual. Some of the students and teachers whom she
meets for the first time represent a broader experience, it may be, than
her own home life has given her. They are often new types and new types
are always interesting.
I shall say nothing of the idealism of friendship--it plays its part in
other books. It would seem sometimes as if almost too much emphasis had
been placed upon the making of friendships in school,--friendship which
is, after all, but a by-product, the most valuable it is true,
nevertheless a by-product of the life. Wholly practical are the tests of
friendship which I shall give. In the first place a friend is too
absorbing who takes all of one's interest to the exclusion of
everything else: there should be interest in other people, other
activities as well as in one's work. Such a friendship can only make a
girl forget for what she has come to school. The new relation which
disposes one to look with less respect and affection upon one's own
people and home--and they, be it remembered, have stood the most
valuable test of all, the test of time--cannot be a good influence. It
may be said in general that an association which is developing the less
fine traits in one's character, giving emphasis to the less worthy
sides, should be relinquished immediately, even at the cost of much
heartache. The heartache will be only temporary; the bad influence might
become permanent. On the other hand, since friendship is giving as well
as taking, one does well to consider the fact that if one's own part in
it does not tell for good, there is just as much reason for stopping the
friendship where it is. Some of these associations--and this is a hard
saying, I know--which seem everything at the time are nothing, as the
years will prove. A girl idealizes, and idealizes those who are not
worthy. Inevitably the day comes when she laughs at herself,--if she
does not do worse and pity herself for having been such a goose.
Only a few of the friendships made in school are destined to endure. One
of the foremost of those that last is founded on similarity of interest.
Perhaps it is the girl with whom one has worked side by side in the
laboratory,--a relation formed slowly and on a permanent basis. Many of
the bes
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