单项选择题

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time; to be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating, and I never found a companion so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad than when we stay in our chambers, for solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The farmer, who can work alone all day without feeling lonesome, but must recreate with others at night, wonders how the student can sit alone at night; he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is actually at work in his field and chopping his wood as the farmer was in his. Society is commonly too cheap: we meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other; we meet at meals three times a day and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are; we live thick and are in each other’’s way, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable; certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications between men. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live, for as the value of a man is not in his skin, we need not touch him. The example of the farmer and the students shows that________ .