Girls are often tempted to retail their family affairs to some chosen friend, from a love of confidential mysteries; the pleasure of being a martyr leads not only to the communication of moving details of home life, but frequently to their invention.  A friend of mine adopted a niece, who afterwards married and wrote from India asking her aunt to look through and burn her old letters.  My friend found touching pictures of home tyranny in the letters from school friends and answers to similar complaints, which the niece had evidently written about her own treatment and since forgotten; possibly the home circles of the other girls would have found the same difficulty that my friend did in recognizing themselves: 

    “Portrayed with sooty garb and features swarth.”

Equal with Honour, and before Tact, among the conditions of Friendship, I would place Truth, for there can be no union without this for a basis.  We have touched already on the truth involved in what is called being “faithful” to a friend, but there are many other kinds required.  Passing over the more obvious of these, I would draw attention to the subtler form of untruth, involved in endowing your friend with imaginary gifts and graces.

Yet the more we know of a true friend, the more we find to reverence in him, and the more ground for humility in ourselves:  “Have a quick eye to see” their virtues; nay, more, idealize those virtues as much as you will, for this is a very different thing from endowing them with those they have not; this is only learning to see with that divine insight essential to the highest truth in friendship.  “There is a perfect ideal,” says Ruskin, “to be wrought out of every human face around us,” and so it is with our friends’ characters.

And when we have found that ideal and true self, we must be loyal to it—­loyal to our friends against their lower selves as well as against their detractors.  Plutarch says, “The influence of a true friend is felt in the help that he gives the noble part of nature; nothing that is weak or poor meets with encouragement from him.  While the flatterer fans every spark of suspicion, envy, or grudge, he may be described in the verse of Sophocles as ’sharing the love and not the hatred of the person he cares for.’” Such a bit as that makes us forget the centuries which have rolled between us and Plutarch; his temptations are ours—­how much easier it is to us to please our friends by sympathizing with their feelings, whether that feeling be right or wrong!  How much pleasanter it is to us to gratify our selfish affection by giving them what they want, as Wentworth did King Charles, than to brace them to endure hardness for the sake of others!

We are so apt to give and to ask for weakening consolation.  Sympathy in the ordinary use of the term is more weakening than anything, and it is pleasant to give and to take.