Friendship

Blue must have had many friends. No man as generous of himself as he could have been long without them. Yet, he seems to have had few intimates. Friendship was one of life's fine things to him, and yet he did not look upon it altogether as the rest of us do. Sometimes, I think, he was a friend out of charity. Once, I gathered from his conversation, he had been mistaken in a friend. But he looked back on the treachery of the man he loved more with kindness than with pity, and more with pity than with grief. "Friendship, at worst," he once said to me, "is an investment. Your friend, no matter how he may turn out in the end, is an addition to your life. He brings some things, and whatever his disloyalty, these things he cannot take away."

Mr. Blue