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was, apparently, like the Jolly Young Waterman, "rowing along", thinking of nothing at all.


And besides more general matters, there was ... for so is it in friendship as in love... ever that quiet undercurrent of inexhaustible curiosity about each other as an Ego, a psychic fact not yet mutually explained. Therewith comes in that kindly seeking to know better and better the Other, is a being not yet fully outlined, as one whom we would understand even from the farthest-away time when neither friend suspected the other's existence, when each was meeting the world alone—as one now looks back on those days... and was absorbed in so much else in life, before Time had been willing to say, "Now meet, you two! Have I not been preparing you for each other?" So met, the simple personal retrospect is an ever new affair of detail for them, with its queries, its confessions, its comparisons. «I thought that, but now I think this. Once on a time I believed that, but now I believe this. I did so and so, in those