MEETING AGAIN.

Otago Witness, Issue 2892, 11 August 1909, Page 78

MEETING AGAIN.

To meet again with our friends after an ntervaJs of years may well be the greatest )f all joy 6, but> to meet again with our riendly acquaintance from whom we have >een long divided, by circumstances r « by 10 means always a great pleasure. The■nought of the reunion is fraught, no ioubt, with a certain sensation of excitenent. We cannot brine ourselves to Teuse tJw opportunity, ye* how seldom we sntirely enjoy it. There are, of course, 1 few men and women in whose persona-

lity. time makes no change. They alter in nothing but appearance. They have from youth to age the same manners, the same interests, the same sympathies, the same friends. Their environment may change to any extent. They may go from Piccadilly to the desert, or from Clapham to the backwoods ; they come back "just the same." They may begin behind a shop and end in the front of the world. They may marry, they may grow •rich, they may prosper or fail. The first thing to be said of them by every fellowcreatuTe who sits in judgment upon them is that they are "just the same." Phey are as they were born, and they take it for granted that everyone else is also. They .are strong peopfe, never carried away by their experience, and they have a strange power of annihilating time for others, and bringing them back, as we say, "to their ©id selves. " They may or may not have very quick sympathies ; they have always very strong affections. Nevertheless it is sometimes a qualified pleasure to see them again. Some of us do not want to be reminded of our old eehes, and come away with an uncomfortable feeling that we have renewed acquaintance with one person more than, we bargained for. But such people are exceptional, and belong to a strongly-marked type. The majority change with the years inwardly as well as outwardly, perhaps inwardly even more than outwardly. We may have no difficulty in recognising them at first sight, and yet after a quarter of an hour's talk we may feel quite unable to realise their identity. Tney may even give us a strange sensation, as if we could doubt our own. .They have developed in an opposite direction to that which we expected ; or is it we wibo have changed ? The years between youth and middle age. are the most eventful years of life, and those in which long separations most commonly occur. During the time that elapses between a parting and a meeting again we very often follow, as it were subconsciously, the career of our acquaintance. Every time we are reminded of them we instinctively form a mental picture of what they have become — a picture by no means always corrected by what we hear casually of the actual facte. John Smith was a conceited fellow, we- say to ourselves. .Though we Mked him, he has probably made a good many enemies by now ; his self-confidence must have stood in bis way. He was ambitious too; probably he has become rather embittered. Then chanoe throws ■us once more across his path. He is a grave man, self-confident, successful, and with troops of friends. No doubt the boy we knew is still theme somewhere, but we cannot find him, and we feel confused. Then perhaps there was a man we lost sight of for a time on whom we looked down a little. He also was one whom we liked ; we had a pleasing little feeling that he looked up to us. It was natural, we felt ; our chances were better than his. No doubt he envied them. We perhaps often thought ol him during the interval, always that he had "got on," but the news made no permanent difference to the development of our mental picture. We still looked downwards to ccc him with our mind's eye. A*t last chance throws us across hie path again. We did not understand that he had passed us on the world's stairs, and we are inwardly ~* astonished to find Mm a man of far more account than ourselves, ■uod we realise with a smile that is not altogether without bitterness that he must remember our old relations with something of amusement. Was it really us to whom he used to defer? We cannot take up the old role. Yet we cannot take up any other. On the whole, we •wish we had never seen him again Or the positions are reversed. We t'ealise our. success with a sudden sharp thrill of pleasure which comes unbidden and comes of contrast, followed) most likely by a horrid sense of remorse. What bruites we are, we say to ourselves, and how vulgarminded! We wish we had no* met and indulged in such an unworthy sensation. It will bring us ill-luck ; we feel sure it will. .rietwean women the sudden resumption of intimacy with a person who has been away is even more embarrassing than among men. A familiarity which has ceased to be habitual is irksome, and the gradations of intimacy are more marked. Also a woman's career is — or she always thinks it is — more a matter of chance than that ol a man, and she is still more the creature of environment. She must be a very good woman if she never rebels against fate when she suddenly sees again someone who has -ealised- so many more than she has done of the hopes once common to both, and she must be very just-min<Jed if she never vents a disappointment, which should rightly be an abstraict feeling, upon some particular person. On the other hand, if the prosperous person is not sorry for her less prosperous friend, ishe is far more hardhearted than the average woman ; but feelings of pity and of envy, however soon dismissed, are bad omens for the renewal of friendship. But suppose all these petty factors to be out of the question, and that two people meet again who are by nature really good and generous, or who still stand about equal so far as luck and the world are concerned, who have run the race apart, no doubt, but abreast. It is still very difficult to knit up a friendship severed by time. For one thing, the iirst meeting, which should relay the foundation, often leaves a gloomy impression upon the minds of the people concerned. There is no disguising the fact that it is sad to look back. We are apt to come away from such a meeting possessed' by the recollection of — Th» eyes that shone now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken. Even merry memories sometimes assume a false air of pathos. ■ • Again, we have to censider the fact that \n no perception do people differ more

completely than in the perception of time. Long and short sight "forms but a poor analogy for long and short memory. The sense of proportion where the past is concerned seeme sometimes not to be the same in any given pair of people. One man may be hardly able to recall an incident which seemt to his past friend to b& the key to his character. Some meoa and women live to be old, as it were, ir possession of a perfect picture of their whole lives. For many others nothing but the foreground is clear, and out of the haze stand certain events in wholly undue prominence. These persons who cannot see behind them seldom know their own defects. Th<eg talk of what is there with misplaced confidence, and confuse t<he interlocutor who sees a different scene. In real truth they have no past an common, and that though they spent it together. Again, there are a few naturally uncandid persons who are not otherwise bad. They have been forced by circumstances, or even by conscience, to take a fairly accurate view of what goes on around them. They control their sentimentality, or their melancholy, or their excessive egoism and> sens© of their own importance whale it is called to-day. But once take them into theregion of memory and they give full rein to their inclinations. The past becomes a fancy world known to none but themselves. Of counse we do not mean any of tie above reflections to apply to love. Love in all its many forms is not subject to destruction by time. Indian parents and children after years' of separation not seldom renew the tendercst relations. The tie of blood is independent of common recollections, and the spirit of criticism engendered by absence may make for as well as against a good.,understanding. A long engagement generally turns oat better if the pair ar-3 parted ; but he-re again love has nothing to do with v. common past. As to those '«w and true friendships upon which absence has no effect, they depend for the most part upon common interests, intewsts which are impersonal, and very often abstract. B-u/t it may be said : You ape limiting true friendship to persons of intellectual interest. To say that would be, no doubt, tc make too sweeping a, statement. Absence-proof friendships do exist which, are founded on nothing but an indefinable affinity of soul, but they are rare. — The Spectator.