l sympathetically, you would end by understanding them."

"I don't think I should. At least I might in a sort of pathological
way, as one comes to understand a disease; but I shouldn't understand
why they exist. It seems to me, most people aren't fit to exist; and I
dare say they have the same opinion about me."

"But are there no people of whose existence you approve?"

"Yes, a few: my friends."

"Surely," cried Ellis, "you flatter us! How often have you said that
you don't see why we are this, that, or the other! How often have
you complained of our faces, our legs, our arms, in fact, our whole
physique, not to mention spiritual blemishes!"

"Well," he replied, "I don't deny that it's a great grief to me to
be unable really and objectively to approve of any of my friends.
Still----"

"Still," I interrupted, "you have given me the suggestion I wanted.
For the relation of affection, however imperfect it may be, gives us
at least something which perhaps we shall find comes nearer to what
we might conceive to be absolutely Good than anything else we have yet
hit upon."

"How so?"

"Well, to begin with, one's friend appears to one, does he not, as
an object good in its own nature, not merely by imposition of our own
ideal upon an alien stuff, as we said was the case with works of art?"

"I don't know about that!" said Audubon. "In my own case, at any rate,
I am sure that my friends never see me at all as I really am, but
simply read into me their own ideal. They have just as much imposed
upon me their own conception, as if I were the marble out of which
they had carded a statue."

"You must allow us to be the judges of that," I replied.

"Well, but," he said, "anyhow you can't deny that such illusions are
common. What lover ever saw his mistress as she really is?"

"No," I said, "I don't deny that. But at the same time I should affirm
that the truer the love, the less the illusion. In what is commonly
called love, no doubt, the physical element is the predominant, or
even the only one present; and in that case there may be illusion to
an indefinite extent. But the love which is based upon years of common
experience, which has grown with the growth of the whole person,
in power and intelligence and insight, which has survived countless
disappointments and surmounted countless obstacles, the love of
husband and wife, the love, as we began by saying, of friends--such
love, as Browning says boldly, 'is never bli