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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last confidential letter
to one of his own sex. 'If you consider it rightly,' he wrote long
after, 'you will find the want of correspondence no such strange
want in men's friendships. There is, believe me, something noble
in the metal which does not rust though not burnished by daily
use.' It is well said; but the last letter to Frank Scott is
scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the writer has outgrown his
old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from
a busy youth of three and twenty, breathes of seventeen: the
sickening alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope IN
VACUO, the lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world
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