particular friend" is almost a necessity to girl nature,
and need not and ought not to interfere with home ties and interests).
Even if her mother's visiting list is long, each household will not
include a girl of her own age with whom she could be intimate, and many
will live at a distance to make frequent intercourse out of the
question.

Yes, your circle will narrow to some five or six, perhaps even three or
four, girls, and you will naturally see most of the one living nearest
to you.

You meet in your strolls, if you live in the country, you continually
"drop in" to tea and tennis at each other's houses. If you live in a
town, you drop in just before or just after your round of more formal
visits, and you get to know each others' daily lives, daily interests,
pleasures, and difficulties very thoroughly, and this interweaving of
the day-to-day existence forms many a friendship.

You get accustomed to each other; the trivial incidents of the hour,
perhaps its gossip, which have a transient interest for the one,
interests the other no less. Your friend knows just what work you are
doing, just what book you are reading. You have a great deal of time for
talking, and by degrees each knows almost everything about the life of
the other, for the lives are short, and at this period neither profound
nor intricate.

Now, if you are really fitted to be friends to one another, this
intimacy may be a very good beginning; you know each other thoroughly,
and the mutual affection, sympathy, and help I spoke of in a former
paper are much more possible when there is such perfect acquaintance. At
the same time there are features in such a friendship which tell very
much against the idea of its long continuance.

To begin with, such frequent meetings must often exhaust the materials
for conversation. Girls do not usually "take in" to such large extent
that they can be continually "giving out" with interest to their
hearers. Do you not sometimes find that you have nothing more to say to
your friend since you saw her yesterday? You have had one short, stupid
letter from a school companion, you have tried your hand at making
orange fritters and failed, and cook says you must try something easier;
you have read a little more of the book you discursed yesterday, and
done a little more of the painting, and when these subjects are disposed
of conversation flags.

You begin to find each other just a little, a very little dull, and it
i