Where a coruscation of the skies and a trembling of the earth do not attend the birth of the new love; where nature does not rend the air with a cry of voluptuousness or of pain, no one can deceive me: a friendship, an affection, some sort of a sentiment, may have come into existence; but I shall certainly not christen the new-born with the sacred baptism of love. And thus, naturally, we have arrived at those frontiers which separate the only legitimate way by which we may enter the temple from those ways that lead to it through oblique and unused paths. Friendship can be a source of love, and a very good one, but it is always a pathological, unnatural origin, which leads step by step to the worst of the sources of love, such as gratitude, compassion, vanity, lust, revenge. When one has been able to see a woman during a long time, talk to her and perhaps live with her without calling her by any other name but that of sister or friend, if he feels some day that he loves her, such love resembles those tropical fruits grown in our climate by means of manure and hothouse. Whether friendship is possible between man and woman is an old problem which will never be solved, because many give that name to true, real loves, which, approaching the threshold of desire, held back, perhaps, by the rigid hand of duty, oscillate suavely and lingeringly in front of the temple without ever entering it. It is by a conventional politeness that to these loves we give the name of friendship, and I will certainly not condemn such innocent falsification; but a true and real friendship, with all the specific characteristics that distinguish this serene affection between man and woman, is not possible except on one condition: to obliterate every sexual mark in the two beings that have shaken hands. And the elimination of the sex in an individual is such a cruel mutilation, both physical and moral, that it destroys more than half of man. If friendship unites two eunuchs of this kind, I shall say that their affection is no longer that which exists between man and woman, but that of two neutral beings. However, as long as a single desire of the other's person is possible in them, as long as the most chaste, the most innocent of desires may arise in them, friendship becomes love. How many are these moral eunuchs? How many men and women can love without desire? Count them and then I shall be able to tell you how many are the cases, well ascertained, of _friendship without love_ between man and woman. I wish, nevertheless, to be more explicit, so that I may not seem to go on beating about the bushes without attacking and solving the question because I find it difficult. Are there in this sublunary world a man and a woman glad to see each other, who love each other and who have never desired even a kiss from each other? Yes; those two angels, then, are friends and I admit the possibility of the psychological phenomenon of friendship between two persons of different sex.