How to Keep Your Friends

1901

"The less you exact of your friends the more they will give you," writes Helen Watterson Moody of "The First Tragedy In a Girl's Life" in The Ladies' Home Journal.

"For yourself give as richly and as nobly as you want to of your love and your confidence and your loyalty. Live up to your highest ideal of what a friend should be (and the higher you make that ideal the finer woman you will be and the more friends will flock to you), but never exact of your friends that they shall give you more than they choose easily to give. If someone you love disappoints you — and as many, many more will do in days to come — do not hold up your ideal of what they should be and do as a mirror in which to count their imperfections. Let it pass, if you can, with a little smile that may be sad, but need not be at all satirical. And never be jealous of a friend if you want to keep one. If anybody you are fond of forms other friendships or seems to be engrossed with other friends, do not let it make you unhappy and, above all, never comment upon her all too evident neglect of her old friends for her new ones."