Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/104

88 an abstraction of friendship, or where circumstances keep both persons at a certain distance from each other, so that the competition of the respective interests finds no point of conflict. Ifa conflict and an estrangement are to be avoided in a constant living together, one person must so far give up his independence that the preponderance of the other changes into domineering guidance. But if this is the case, the true conception of the friendship which is to exist between persons of the same sex is lost.

Among men it is now ambition, now partisanship, now. the friction of character, now a difference in principles, etc.; among women it is generally competition in love, jealousy, vanity, etc., which causes the rupture of friendships.. (Examples of friendship among women are hardly ever to be found except with old maids who have resigned all human impulses, especially sexual competition.) But these points of collision disappear entirely by the side of the all-conclusive fact that persons of the same sex do not at all possess, and cannot possess, the qualities which enable them to satisfy each other entirely, to complement each other entirely, and, I might say, to let the cogs of their egoism work exactly into each other. The man can never fill the place of a woman to the man, the woman can never fill that of a man to the woman, but the man can fill the place of a woman to the woman, and the woman the place of a man to the