Friendship between men is a very different thing. Something honest and
frank, from which consequently they withdraw without anger, mutual
obligation, or fear. Friendship between women is a kind of masonic oath;
the breaking of it a mutual crime. When two women friends quarrel, they
generally continue to carry deadly weapons against each other, which
they are only restrained from using by mutual fear.

There _are_ honest women. At least we believe there are. It is a
necessary part of our belief. Who does not think well of mother or
sister? But who _believes entirely_ in a mother or a sister? Absolutely
and unconditionally? Who has never caught mother or sister in a
falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes seen in the heart of
mother or sister, as by a lightning flash, an abyss which the
profoundest love cannot bridge over?

Who has ever really understood his mother or sister?

The human being dwells and moves alone. Each woman dwells in her own
planet formed of centrifugal fires enveloped in a thin crust of earth.
And as each star runs its eternal course through space, isolated amid
countless myriads of other stars, so each woman goes her solitary way
through life.

It would be better for her if she walked barefoot over red-hot
ploughshares, for the pain she would suffer would be slight indeed
compared to that which she must feel when, with a smile on her lips, she
leaves her own youth behind and enters the regions of despair we call
"growing old," and "old age...."

All this philosophizing is the result, no doubt, of having eaten