The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.

Saki’s line skewers a familiar kind of hypocrisy: the person who praises loyalty, self-denial, and “being there” in the abstract, but only when the costs fall on someone else. The wit lies in the contrast between admiring sacrifice as an aesthetic or moral ideal (“beautiful in her eyes”) and refusing to bear any inconvenience personally. It also hints at friendship being treated as a social performance—valued for the flattering image it confers—rather than as a reciprocal bond. In Saki’s satiric world, such sentiments expose the selfishness and moral laziness that can hide beneath refined manners and high-minded talk.