I have heard men say, to prove their independence, their proud spirit, their unbending self-respect, “I never apologize.”  They say it in such conscious pride, and so honestly expect me to admire them, and I am so amiable, that I never dare remonstrate.  I simply keep out of their way.  But I feel like saying:  “Poor, pitiful soul!  Poor, meagre nature!  Not to know the gladness of restoring a smile to a face from which you have driven it.  Only to know the coldness of a misnamed pride; never to know the close, warm joy of humility.”

Many people know nothing about a real apology.  A lukewarm apology is more insulting than the insult.  A handsome apology is the handsomest thing in the world—­and the manliest and the womanliest.  An apology, like chivalry, is sexless.  Perhaps because it is a natural virtue of women, it sits manlier upon men than upon women.

                            ...  “It becomes
  The throned monarch better than his crown.”

Even as chivalry, being a natural attribute of men, becomes beautiful beyond words to express when found in women.

I have often heard men say they never apologize.  Sometimes I have heard women.  Pitiful, indeed, it becomes then.  A woman without religion is no more repulsive to me than one who “never apologizes.”  How I pity the people who love those men and women who “never apologize.”  A delicate apology brings into play all the virtues necessary to a perfect humanity.  The proudest are generally those who can bend the lowest.  It is not pride; it is a stupid vanity and an abnormal self-love which prevent a man or woman from apologizing.  An apology requires a native humility of which only great souls are capable.  It requires generosity to be willing to humble yourself.  It takes faith in humanity to think that your apology will be accepted.  You must have a sense of justice to believe that you owe it.  It requires sincerity to make it sound honest, and tact to do it at the right time.  It requires patience to stick to it until the wound has ceased to bleed, and the best, highest, truest type of love to make you want to do it.

There is only one thing meaner than a person who never apologizes, and that is a person who will not accept one.

It requires a finer type of generosity to receive generously than to give generously.  And a nature is more divine which can forgive honestly and quickly than one which can only apologize and is not capable of a swift forgiveness.  But it is a wise dispensation of Providence that the two are twin virtues, and are generally to be met with in the same broad and beautiful nature.

Used against a high soul, there is no surer method of humiliation than an apology.  In one skilled at reading human nature, an apology becomes a weapon.  When you are not the one who should apologize first, when you are less to blame than he, be you the one to apologize first, and see how quickly his noble nature will abase itself, and rush to meet you, and how sure and glorious and complete the reconciliation will be!