There is no denying that there is great temptation to violent admirations and attractions in school.  In the first place, in school or college the girl is brought into contact with a large circle of people who are immensely interesting to her.  The whole atmosphere is full of novelty, of the unusual.  Some of the students and teachers whom she meets for the first time represent a broader experience, it may be, than her own home life has given her.  They are often new types and new types are always interesting.

I shall say nothing of the idealism of friendship—­it plays its part in other books.  It would seem sometimes as if almost too much emphasis had been placed upon the making of friendships in school,—­friendship which is, after all, but a by-product, the most valuable it is true, nevertheless a by-product of the life.  Wholly practical are the tests of friendship which I shall give.  In the first place a friend is too absorbing who takes all of one’s interest to the exclusion of everything else:  there should be interest in other people, other activities as well as in one’s work.  Such a friendship can only make a girl forget for what she has come to school.  The new relation which disposes one to look with less respect and affection upon one’s own people and home—­and they, be it remembered, have stood the most valuable test of all, the test of time—­cannot be a good influence.  It may be said in general that an association which is developing the less fine traits in one’s character, giving emphasis to the less worthy sides, should be relinquished immediately, even at the cost of much heartache.  The heartache will be only temporary; the bad influence might become permanent.  On the other hand, since friendship is giving as well as taking, one does well to consider the fact that if one’s own part in it does not tell for good, there is just as much reason for stopping the friendship where it is.  Some of these associations—­and this is a hard saying, I know—­which seem everything at the time are nothing, as the years will prove.  A girl idealizes, and idealizes those who are not worthy.  Inevitably the day comes when she laughs at herself,—­if she does not do worse and pity herself for having been such a goose.

Only a few of the friendships made in school are destined to endure.  One of the foremost of those that last is founded on similarity of interest.  Perhaps it is the girl with whom one has worked side by side in the laboratory,—­a relation formed slowly and on a permanent basis.  Many of the best of friends have come together through community of interests, and this is a type of friendship for which men have a greater gift than women.