"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible." Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Ch XX, Failure (1871). Yet curiously th

"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible." Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Ch XX, Failure (1871). Yet curiously there is constant mention of friends in the preceding chapters and beyond: I looked up the quotation in the Gutenberg Project version, and the sentence following has the 105th of 149 occurrences of the string "friends". Was Adams just being sententious, or do we have inconsistent notions of what friends are, or both?