When the conception of love is, as it has tended to be in modern times, legalistic, these problems are submerged. As long as marriage is a matter of contract, the importance of the inward harmony of personalities is of the slightest, for children may be begotten and reared whether the parents love or hate. As long as passion is generally conceded to be but a shameful concession to unregenerate humanity, the average man is not likely to be concerned if he finds that the ideal of the poets is not realized in his own nuptial couch. But when love is free and unashamed then it is made ten times more difficult, for lives are recognized as frank failures which once would have seemed useful and satisfactory. Fiction, too, becomes, not more interesting, but more important. It ceases completely to be what it always tends to be when opinion is fixed, namely, a mere illustration of the working out of social or moral “laws”; it becomes frankly the record of individual souls in search of a successful way of life. It records, no doubt, more failures than successes, but it furnishes the best and perhaps only really important material for the study of that art of life which grows ever more complicated as we demand that it be more complete and beautiful. Can Men and Women Be Friends? By Floyd Dell Floyd Dell _was born at Barry, Illinois, June 28th, 1887. Is the author of several novels and collections of essays including “Janet March,” a story of a young woman and her adjustment to modern standards. His latest book is “Looking at Life.” Other books are “Women as World Builders,” 1913; “Were You Ever a Child?” 1919; “Moon Calf,” 1920; “The Briary Bush,” 1921._ CAN MEN AND WOMEN BE FRIENDS? BY FLOYD DELL Friendship between men and women is rather a new thing in the history of the world. Friendship depends upon equality and choice, and there has been very little of either in the relations of the sexes, up to the present. A woman does not choose her male relatives, nor is she according to archaic family laws their equal; motives other than personal choice might lead her to become a man’s wife; wholly impersonal reasons might place her in the relationship of kept mistress. Only in her rôle of paramour was there any implication of free choice; and even here there was no full equality, not even of danger. None of these customary relationships of the past can be said to have fostered friendship between men and women. Doubtless it did exist, but under difficulties.