And when we scattered in the directions of the winds, one going to the High School, the second into the army, the third into a vocation, our passion flared up again, and we swore to come together again after a certain number of years had gone by. What merry, spirited, and lusty boys we were!... If only I had not seen them again, these friends! If only they could have continued to live in my memory as a precious heritage from a period that was rich in hopes and poor in disillusionments. It is with a shudder that I recall the evening, when, after many years of separation, we had a reunion. Were these my living friends? No, these had been dead many years. I sat among corpses, among alien corpses who spoke a language that was not mine. One whom fortune had made a millionaire sat there vain and self-conscious. Absorbed in himself and morose sat one who clung to his grandiose fantasies in the modest station he occupied. A third kept looking at his watch uneasily because he had promised his wife to be home before ten o’clock. The fourth stroked his paunch and was absorbed in the mysteries of the menu. A fifth gazed at his highly-polished finger-nails and yawned. The sixth and the seventh--but enough! They looked at one another strangely, and on the lips of all was the unuttered question: “Why in--did we come here?” These were friendships which had been made when we were still in our childhood. Later on the matter was not quite so simple, and it took a long time before we found one with whom we could become as one. In reality, we are still like children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings. We let each other speak and we listen, and we call that “being understood.” That is not so easy as one would like to believe. There are people who cannot listen and people to whom we cannot listen. But ultimately one finds the right person, one to whom we can entrust our secrets, one with whom we share our joys and our woes. But for how long? How strange! The fate of these friendships is sealed the moment a third person acquires the right to participate: a woman. Marriage is the rock on which most friendships split. What was formerly a question for two is now a question for three. And if the friend too marries it becomes a question for four. But how difficult it is to find four persons whose hearts beat harmoniously! What new elements now enter into the previous requirements “to understand each other!” Vanity, jealousy, envy, disfavour.