A similar feeling of puzzlement to that which I have indicated, besets one not unfrequently in the contemplation of men and women.  You are brought in contact with a person, you attempt to comprehend him, to enter into him, in a word to be him, and, if you are utterly foiled in the attempt, you cannot flatter yourself that you have been successful to the measure of your desire.  A person interests, or piques, or tantalises you, you do your best to make him out; yet strive as you will, you cannot read the riddle of his personality.  From the invulnerable fortress of his own nature he smiles contemptuously on the beleaguering armies of your curiosity and analysis.  And it is not only the stranger that thus defeats you; it may be the brother brought up by the same fireside with you, the best friend whom you have known from early school and college days, the very child, perhaps, that bears your name, and with whose moral and mental apparatus you think you are as familiar as with your own.  In the midst of the most amicable relationships and the best understandings, human beings are, at times, conscious of a cold feeling of strangeness—­the friend is actuated by a feeling which never could actuate you, some hitherto unknown part of his character becomes visible, and while at one moment you stood in such close neighbourhood, that you could feel his arm touch your own, in the next there is a feeling of removal, of distance, of empty space betwixt him and you in which the wind is blowing.  You and he become separate entities.  He is related to you as Border peel is related to Border peel on Tweedside, or as ship is related to ship on the sea.  It is not meant that any quarrel or direct misunderstanding should have taken place, simply that feeling of foreignness is meant to be indicated which occurs now and then in the intercourse of the most affectionate; which comes as a harsh reminder to friends and lovers that with whatsoever flowery bands they may be linked, they are separated persons, who understand, and can only understand, each other partially.  It is annoying to be put out in our notions of men and women thus, and to be forced to rearrange them.  It is a misfortune to have to manoeuvre one’s heart as a general has to manoeuvre his army.  The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the servants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.  And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go.  Every man’s road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings.  Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference, and marriage a parricide.  From these accidents to the affections, and from the efforts to repair them, life has in many a patched and tinkered look.