The Woman of to-Morrow by Helen M. Winslow

It is the custom to cry out against the lack of originality in woman; and it is quite true that those who have achieved it have first known the blessedness of solitude. It is the only way. It is difficult for the average woman to realize it, but she either takes too much from or gives too much to her friends. But the best and truest friendships are perhaps those which cannot stand the crucial test of a perpetual companionship. Just because one happens to know the power of giving out much, of feeling intensely, of being for the time so very much to those for whom she cares-precisely for this reason will she need at times to draw into herself, to go away, to be alone, to rest.

Especially is this true if those friends have the sympathetic temperament which takes its color partly from its surroundings. Your happiness, then, becomes partly theirs; they share in your anxiety, your sorrow, your depression-in everything, in fact, that belongs to you. In like manner they compel you to feel with them; and the result, perhaps, hardly recognized at the time, is to make you aware that you have been interested most intensely, that you have given out without intending it, something almost too intimate and too much your own to be so given.