We know people only in dotted outline, that is to say, with gaps in our knowledge which we have to fill in ourselves, as best we can. Thus, even those we know well are largely made up of our imagination. Sometimes the lines are so broken, with even the guiding dots missing, that a portion of the picture remains darkly confused and uncertain. If, then, our best friends are only pieces of broken outline strung on a thread of imagination, do we really know anybody at all, or does anybody know us except in the same disjointed fashion?
But perhaps it is these very loopholes, allowing entrance to each other’s imagination, which make for intimacy; otherwise each one, secure in his inviolate individuality, would have been unapproachable to all but the Dweller within. Our own self, too, we know only in bits, and with these scraps of material we have to shape the hero of our life-story,—likewise with the help of our imagination. Providence has, doubtless, deliberately omitted portions so that we may assist in our own creation.