Friendship brings everything that heaven could bring.  There is no labor that cannot become a living rapture if you know that a friend is thinking of you as you labor.  So you sing at your work.  For the work is part of the thoughts of your friend; so you love it!

Love is demanding and claiming and insistent.  Friendship is all kindness—­it makes the world glorious with kindness.  What color you see when you walk with a friend!  You see that the gray sky is brilliant and shimmering; you see that the smoke has warm browns and is marvelously sculptured—­the air becomes iridescent.  You see the gold in brown hair.  Light floods everything.

   When you walk to church with a friend you know that life can give
   you nothing richer.  You pray that there will be no change in
   anything for ever.

What an adorable thing it is to discover a little foible in your friend, a bit of vanity that gives you one thing more about her to adore!  On a cold morning she will perhaps walk to church with you without her furs, and she will blush and return an evasive answer when you ask her why she does not wear them.  You will say no more, because you understand.  She looks beautiful in her furs; you love their darkness against her cheek; but you comprehend that they conceal the loveliness of her throat and the fine line of her chin, and that she also has comprehended this, and, wishing to look still more bewitching, discards her furs at the risk of taking cold.  So you hold your peace, and try to look as if you had not thought it out.

   This theory is satisfactory except that it does not account for
   the absence of the muff.  Ah, well, there must always be a mystery
   somewhere!  Mystery is a part of enchantment.

Manual labor is best.  Your heart can sing and your mind can dream while your hands are working.  You could not have a singing heart and a dreaming mind all day if you had to scheme out dollars, or if you had to add columns of figures.  Those things take your attention.  You cannot be thinking of your friend while you write letters beginning “Yours of the 17th inst. rec’d and contents duly noted.”  But to work with your hands all day, thinking and singing, and then, after nightfall, to hear the ineffable kindness of your friend’s greeting—­always there—­for you!  Who would wake from such a dream as this?

Dawn and the sea—­music in moonlit gardens—­nightingales serenading through almond-groves in bloom—­what could bring such things into the city’s turmoil?  Yet they are here, and roses blossom in the soot.  That is what it means not to be alone!  That is what a friend gives you!

Having thus demonstrated that he was about twenty-five and had formed a somewhat indefinite definition of friendship, but one entirely his own (and perhaps Mary’s) Bibbs went to bed, and was the only Sheridan to sleep soundly through the night and to wake at dawn with a light heart.