"Why you feel affection for your sisters from nature and habit; but friendship is voluntary, spontaneous, and a much stronger feeling—friendship is a sentiment."
"And cannot one feel this sentiment, as you call it, for a sister?" asked Katherine, smiling.
"I should think not," returned Julia, musing; "I never had a sister; but it appears to me that the very familiarity of sisters would be destructive to friendship."
"Why I thought it was the confidence—the familiarity—the secrets—which form the very essence of friendship," cried Katherine; "at least so I have always heard."
"True," said Julia, eagerly, "you speak true—the confidence and the secrets—but not the—the—I am not sure that I express myself well—but the intimate knowledge that one has of one's own sister—that I should think would be destructive to the delicacy of friendship."
"Julia means that a prophet has never honour in his own country," cried Charles with a laugh—"a somewhat doubtful compliment to your sex, ladies, under her application of it."
"But what becomes of your innate evidence of worth in friendship," asked Miss Emmerson; "I thought that was the most infallible of all kinds of testimony: surely that must bring you intimately acquainted with each other's secret foibles too."
"Oh! no—that is a species of sentimental knowledge," returned Julia; "it only dwells on the loftier parts of the character, and never descends to the minute knowledge which makes us suffer so much in each other's estimation: it leaves all these to be filled by the—by the—by the—what shall I call it?"
"Imagination," said Katherine, dryly.
"Well, by the imagination then: but it is an imagination that is purified by sentiment, and"—