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Friendship resembles Love in the fact that there are usually three stages. The first stage seems thrilling–but how thankful you are, when you look back upon it, that it is over! The second stage is full of disappointment–how different the friendship realised is from the friendship anticipated! The third stage is philosophical, peaceful, and so happy!–since the worst is known and the best is known, but how immeasurably the best outweighs the worst! and how deliciously restful it is to realise that you, too, are loved, as it were, in spite of yourself and for those qualities in you which are the real you, although you need must hide them under so much dross. Thus you both find happiness and peace. And surely friendship–true friendship–is the happiest and most peaceful state in life? It is the happiest and most peaceful part of Love: it is the one thing which, if you really find it, makes the Everyday of life seem worth the while; seem worth the laughter and the tears, the failures and the victories, the dull beginnings, and the even more tedious beginnings-over-again, which are, alas! inevitable, except in the Human Turnip, who, in parenthesis, is too pompously inert ever to make a start.

A very well-known actress once confessed to me that, no matter how warm had been her welcome, she invariably felt a feeling of hostility between the audience and herself when she first walked on the stage. But I rather think that everyone, except the Human Turnip, who feels nothing except thirst and hunger and cold, has that feeling at the beginning. No matter if your advent has been heralded by a fanfare of trumpets, you invariably feel within yourself that your debut has been accompanied by the unuttered exclamation: “Oh, my dear! Is that all?” It wears off in time, of course; but it only bears out my theory that beginnings are always difficult–when they are not merely dull. I can quite imagine that the first day in Heaven will be extremely uncomfortable. I know there is no day so long as the first day of a holiday–or any day which seems so short as the last one. For one thing, at the beginning of anything you are never your true, natural self. The “pose,” which you carry about with you amid strange surroundings, hangs like a pall upon your spirits, to bore you as much as it bores those on whom you wish to make the most endearing impression. Later on, it wears off–and what you are–you are! and for what you are–you are either disliked intensely or adored. But you are never completely happy until you are completely natural, and you are never natural at the beginning. That is why you should forgive beginnings, as you, yourself, hope to be forgiven when you, yourself, begin.