What they told me of the inner shrine I shall presently
describe; but when I asked them to say whether they could tell me
instances of the best and highest kind of friendship, existing and
increasing and perfecting itself between two men, or between a man
and a woman, not lovers or wedded, they found a great difficulty in
doing so. We sifted our common experiences of friendships, and we
could find but one or two such, and these had somewhat lost their
bloom. It came then to this: that in the emotional region, many
women, but very few men, can form the highest kind of tie; and we
agreed that men tended to find what they needed in marriage,
because they were rather interested in than dependent upon personal
emotion, and because practical life, as the years went on--the life
of causes, and movements, and organisations, and ideas, and
investigations--tended to absorb the energies of men; and that they
found their emotional life in home ties; and that the man who lived
for emotional relations would tend to be thought, if not to be, a
sentimentalist; but that the real secret lay with women, and with
men of perhaps a feminine fibre.
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