o," a second
self, a twin soul, which more than anything else is able to heighten
and deepen our consciousness of life.

The "love of women" has always about it something tragic and
catastrophic. It means the plunging of one's hands into frozen snow
or burning fire. It means the crossing of perilous glades in tropic
jungles. It means the "sowing of the whirlwind" on the edge of the
avalanche and the hunting of the mirage in the desert. The ecstasy
brought by it is too blinding to serve as an illumination for our days;
and for all the tremulous sweetness of its approach it leaves behind
it the poison of disillusion and the scars of rancour and remorse.

But the passion of friendship for one of one's own sex burns with a
calm clear flame. A thousand little subtleties of observation, that
would mean nothing were we alone, take to themselves a significant
and symbolic value and lead us down pleasant and flower-strewn
vistas of airy fancy. In the absence of our friend the colour of his
imagination falls like a magical light upon the saddest and dullest
scenes; while with him at our side, all the little jerks and jars and
jolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose their
brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of
having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective
moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason
are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable
in our life easy and light to bear.

And what a delicious sense, in the midst of the open or hidden
hostilities of our struggle against the world, to feel one has some one
near at hand with whom, crouched in any "corner of the hubbub,"
we may "make game of _that_" which makes as much of us!

Love, in the sexual sense, fails us in the bitterest crisis of our days
because love, or the person loved, is the chief cause of the misery.
Scourged and lacerated by Aphrodite it is of little avail to flee to
Eros. But friendship--of the noble, rare, _absolute_ kind such as
existed between Montaigne and his sweet Etienne--is the only
antidote, the only healing ointment, the only anodyne, which can
make it possible for us to endure without complete disintegration
"the pangs of despised love" and love's bitter and withering reaction.

Love too--in the ordinary sense--implies jealousy, exclusiveness,
insatiable exactions; whereas friendship, sure of its inviolable roots
in spiritual equality, is rea