Nature can improve you, but you cannot help her; but the true
value of friendship is the mutual benefit to be derived from it.
In the highest sense, this benefit relates not only to the heart, but
to the mind and soul. It is indeed possible for the ignorant, the
unambitious, the unrefined to be firm friends. We hear of true and
lasting friendships existing in peasant life. The rough, barren
mountain-ways of the Scotch Highlands, the coast villages of France,
the vinelands of Germany, the low flats of Holland, the desert of
Africa, the vast plains of America, have furnished the most pathetic
examples of sincere friendship, even though found among the most
uncivilized. Surely, when refinement is added, the blessing should
increase and not diminish, as it so often seems to do. The wigwam of the
Indian is a truer protection for friendship than the gilded walls of
many a drawing-room.
Oh, girls, this is what hurts and soils your characters,--this drawing-
room insincerity, this falseness, this seeming! You can be polite and
honest too; agreeable, and faithful as well. Significant glances, unfair
advantages, uncivil pretensions in the parlor, make you not only
insincere, but suspicious that you, also, are being ogled and scanned
by others. Girls have contributed to make society false when they might
have made it true. That society is insincere to you you will hardly
deny, if poverty, sickness, or any misfortune thrust you from it.
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