[Sidenote: "Platonic Friendship"]

The parents of both, the neighbours, and even the girl herself, usually
know that a man is in love before he finds it out. Sometimes he has to
be told. He has approached a stage of acute and immediate peril when he
recognises what he calls "a platonic friendship."

Young men believe platonic friendship possible; old men know better--but
when one man learns to profit by the experience of another, we may look
for mosquitoes at Christmas and holly in June.

There is an exquisite danger attached to friendships of this kind, and
is it not danger, rather than variety, which is "the spice of life?"
Relieved of the presence of that social pace-maker, the chaperone, the
disciples of Plato are wont to take long walks, and further on, they
spend whole days in the country with book and wheel.

A book is a mysterious bond of union, and by their taste in books do a
man and woman unerringly know each other. Two people who unite in
admiration of Browning are apt to admire each other, and those who
habitually seek Emerson for new courage may easily find the world more
kindly if they face it hand in hand.

A latter-day philosopher has remarked upon the subtle sympathy produced
by marked passages. "The method is so easy and so unsuspect. You have
only to put faint pencil marks against the tenderest passages in your
favourite new poet, and lend the volume to Her, and She has only to
leave here and there the dropped violet of a timid, confirmatory
initial, for you to know your fate."