And thus I did not particularly enjoy his visit, because I could not feel at ease with my visitor.  I could not say frankly what I thought, but had to select topics which I thought he would consider unaffected.

I think, in fact, that we pay too high a price for our British reticence:  perhaps we keep a few foolish and gushing people in order, stifle effusiveness, and dry up unctuousness; but we do so at the price of silencing a much larger number of simple and direct people, and lose much variety of characteristics and interchange of sincere opinions thereby!

XXXVIII

There are some people in the world, I am sure, who are born solitary, who are not conscious of any closeness of relationship with others.  They are not necessarily ungenial people—­indeed they sometimes have a great deal of external geniality; but when it is a question of forming a closer relationship, they are alarmed and depressed by the responsibility which attaches to it, and become colder instead of warmer, the deeper and more imperative that the claims upon them become.  Such people are not as a rule unhappy, because they are spared the pain which arises from the strain of intimacy, and because loss and bereavement do not rend and devastate their hearts.  They miss perhaps the best kind of happiness, but they do not suffer from the penalties that dog the great affections of men.

I had an old friend, who was a boy at school with me, who was of this type.  He was essentially solitary in spirit, though he was amiable and sociable enough.  There can be no harm in my telling the story of his life, as the actors in it are all long ago dead.

He was at the University with me, though not at the same College; I think that owing to a certain similarity of tastes, and perhaps of temperament, I was his nearest and most intimate friend.  He confided in me as far as he confided in any one; but I always felt that there was a certain fence behind which I was never admitted; and probably it was because I never showed any signs of desiring to claim more than he was ready to give in the way of intimacy that he found himself very much at his ease with me.

A year or two after he left the University I heard from him, to my great surprise, that he was engaged to be married.  I went up to see him in town, where he was then living, and he took me to see his fiancee.  She was one of the most beautiful and charming creatures I have ever seen, and the two were evidently, as the phrase goes, very much in love.  I must say that my friend was superficially a most attractive fellow; he had a commanding presence, and great personal beauty, and there was a certain air of mystery about him which must, I think, have added to the charm.  They were married, and for a time, to all appearances, enjoyed great happiness.  A child was born to them, a daughter.  I saw them at intervals, and my impression was that my friend had found the one thing that he wanted, the companionship of a loving, beautiful, and intelligent woman.