This reticence is exactly what friendship is intended to transcend, if we take Walton's
notion of its value as a benchmark. He looks to an ideal friend "to regulate [his]
mind" (I:L2:2). Even Victor, in the revised text, conceives the value of a friend
as being "to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures" (I:L4:23). Victor's reserve,
however, negates this function of friendship, suggesting a limit to how far it is
able to surmount the barriers of what a later time might call ego-defences.