What one then sees is a diverse set of practices that cannot be reduced to a single overarching motive but nonetheless employed the same rhetoric: practices of peacemaking, of countenance, of kinship. The same rhetoric that could ease the reconciliation of enemies could also enable the acceptance of a gift, or bind the affection of friends. It could enable adversaries to lay down a quarrel, without losing face. It could ease the passing of a gift, by its tactful indication that (as the language demonstrated in which a gift was offered) the giver also knew the limits beyond which the obligation it might create would not be pressed. And it could sustain by its binding force a true affection that might one day grow cold, through the infirmity of our natures. …

The story I have set out to tell in this book is drawing near its end; but one final question remains, to which I now turn. What happened to the world I have described?
—The Friend