When it comes to friends, I desire those who will share my happiness, who possess wings of their own and who will fly with me. I seek friends whose qualities illuminate me and train me up for love. It is for these people that I reserve the glowing hours, too good not to share.

When I was in the eighth grade, I had a friend. We were shy and "too serious" about our stud- ies when it was becoming fashionable with our classmates to learn acceptable social behaviors. We said little at school, but she would come to my house and we would sit down with pencils and paper, and one of us would say:"Let's start with a train whistle today." We would sit quietly together and write separate poems or stories that grew out of a train whistle. Then we would read them aloud. At the end of that school year, we were changing into social creatures and the stories and poems stopped.

When I lived for a time in London, I had a friend, he was in despair and I was in despair. But our friendship was based on the idea in each of us that we would be sorry later if we did not explore this great city because we had felt bad at the time. We met every Sunday for five weeks and found many excellent things. We walked until our despairs disappeared and then we parted. We gave London to each other.

For almost four years I have had remarkable friend whose imagination illuminates mine. We write long letters in which we often discover our strangest selves. Each of us appears, sometimes in

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a funny way, in the other's dreams. She and I agree that, at certain times, we seem to be parts of the same mind. In my most interesting moments, I often think : "Yes, I must tell..." We have never met.

It is such comforting companions I wish to keep. One bright hour with their kind is worth more to me than the lifetime services of a psychologist,who will only fill up the healing silence necessary to those darkest moments in which I would rather be my own best friend.

In the eighth grade, what the author did before developing proper social behavior was to_________.

• A.become serious about her study
• B.go to her friend's house regularly
• C.learn from her classmates at school
• D.share poems and stories with her friend