’Hath not love
    Made for all these their sweet particular air
    To shine in, their own beams and names to bear,
    Their ways to wander and their wards to keep,
    Till story and song and glory and all things sleep.’

Mr. Swinburne asked the question of lovers, but perhaps it is none the less applicable to the bore or irrelevant person.  Yet a third definition of the latter here suggests itself.  To be born for each other is, obviously, to be lovers.  Well, not to be born for each other is to be bores.  In future, let us not speak unkindly of the tame bore, let us say—­’We were not born for each other.’

Relations do not, perhaps, invariably suggest the first line of ‘Endymion’; indeed, they are, one fears, but infrequently celebrated in song.  But the same word in the singular, how beautiful it is!  Relation!  In that little word is the whole secret of life.  To get oneself placed in perfect harmony of relation with the world around us, to have nothing in our lives that we wouldn’t buy, to possess nothing that is not sensitive to us, ready to ring a fairy chime of association at our slightest touch:  no irrelevant book, picture, acquaintance, or activity—­ah me! you may well say it is an ideal.  Yes, it is what men have meant by El Dorado, The Promised Land, and all such shy haunts of the Beatific Vision.  Probably the quest of the Philosopher’s Stone is not more wild.  Yet men still seek that precious substitute for Midas.  Brave spirits!  Unconquerable idealists!  Salt of the earth!

But if it be admitted that the quest of the Perfect Relation (in two senses) is hopeless, yet there is no reason why we should not approach as near to it as we can.

We can at least begin by barring the irrelevant person—­in other words, choosing our own acquaintance.  Of course, we have no entire free-will in so important a matter.  Free-will is like the proverbial policeman, never there when most wanted.  There are two classes of more or less irrelevant persons that cannot be entirely avoided:  our blood-relations, and our business-relations—­both often so pathetically distinct from our heart-relations and our brain-relations.  Well, our business-relations need not trouble us over much.  They are not, as the vermin-killer advertisement has it, ‘pests of the household.’  They come out only during business hours.  The curse of the blood-relation, however, is that he infests your leisure moments; and you must notice the pathos of that verbal distinction:  man measures his toil by ‘hours’ (office-hours), his leisure by ‘moments!’