But with such true loyalty your
friendship becomes, at least in ideal, a new life--a life that neither
of you could have alone; a life that is not a mere round of separate
private amusements, but that belongs to a new type of dual yet unified
personality. Nor are you loyal to your friendship merely as to an
abstraction. You are loyal to it as to the common better self of both of
you, a self that lives its own real life. Either such a loyalty to your
friendship is a belief in myths, or else such a type of higher and
unified dual personality actually possesses a reality of its own,--a
reality that you cannot adequately describe by reporting, as to the
taker of a census, that you and your friend are two creatures, with two
distinct cases of a certain sort of fondness to be noted down, and with
each a separate life into which, as an incident, some such fondness
enters. No; were a census of true friendship possible, the census taker
should be required to report: Here are indeed two friends; but here is
also the ideal and yet, in some higher sense, real life of their united
personality present,--a life which belongs to neither of them alone, and
which also does not exist merely as a parcel of fragments, partly in
one, partly in the other of them.
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