“You are too subtle a logician. But to tell you what I mean, there are some acts that still endure after they are performed, such as building, writing, and the like; others do not endure, such as those I have now in mind. In this sense, therefore, I do not say that walking, laughing, looking, and the like, are acts,—and yet all these outward things often give knowledge of those within. Tell me, did you not judge that friend of ours, of whom we were speaking only this morning, to be a light and frivolous man as soon as you saw him walking with that twist of his head, wriggling about, and with affable demeanour inviting the by-standers to doff their caps to him? So, too, when you see anyone gazing too intently with dull eyes after the manner of an idiot, or laughing as stupidly as those goitrous mutes in the mountains of Bergamo,[171]—do you not set him down a very simpleton, although he neither speak nor do aught else? Thus you see that these ways and manners (which I do not for the present regard as acts) in great measure make men known to us. 29.—“But another thing seems to me to give and to take away from reputation greatly, and this is our choice of the friends with whom we are to live in intimate relations; for doubtless reason requires that they who are joined in close amity and fast companionship, shall have their desires, souls, judgments and minds also in accord. Thus, he who consorts with the ignorant or wicked, is deemed ignorant or wicked; and on the contrary, he who consorts with the good, the wise, and the discreet, is himself deemed to be the like. Because by nature everything seems to join willingly with its like. Therefore I think we ought to use great care in beginning these friendships, for he who knows one of two close friends, at once imagines the other to be of the same quality.” Then messer Pietro Bembo replied: “I certainly think we ought to take great care to limit ourselves to friends of like mind with us, as you say, not only because of the gain or loss of reputation, but because there are to-day very few true friends to be found, nor do I believe that the world any longer contains a Pylades and Orestes, a Theseus and Pirithous, or a Scipio and Lælius.[172] On the contrary, by some fatality it happens every day that two friends, who have lived in very cordial love for many years, yet in some way cheat each other at last, either through malice, or jealousy, or fickleness, or some other evil cause: and each gives the other the blame which perhaps both deserve.