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Updated: June 14, 2025
It is a fearsome thing to venture to say anything now about Charles Dickens, whom we have all loved, enjoyed, and laughed over: whose tales are household words in every home where the English tongue is heard, whose characters are our own school-friends, the sentiment of our youthful memories, our boon-companions and our early attachments.
While we were standing looking at the distant pilot-boat, I began to consider a few matters; and the principal thing was this: How were Rectus and I to stand toward each other? Should we travel like a couple of school-friends, or should I make him understand that he was under my charge and control, and must behave himself accordingly?
Elsie's cries, and tears, and hysterical spasms, kept the whole household in commotion. She should never see her brother again never, never. Elizabeth might not be good to her. Sisters-in-law and school-friends were different creatures; she had found that out already. If she could only have died with her mother! These cries broke out vehemently on the night before Mellen's departure.
It was the first time any one had seen her since she started on the wedding-tour, and the bows and smiles she dealt out on every side were not to be numbered. Our pretty girl got one they were school-friends and the horrid boy another, which he barely answered with a solemn nod of his head, being as shy of her, apparently, in her blue silk and white cape, as his sister was of Mr. Davis.
Her school-friends were being absorbed by a life very different from her own, and she was sensitive enough to realize that parents who had not minded her associating with their daughters while they were still at school, would not care for their grown-up lives to be linked together.
Then came a dance in the garden for the young people, and the school-friends of Arthur Dillon made demands upon him for the entertainment of which his boyhood had given such promise; so he sang his songs with nerve and success, and danced strange dances with graceful foot, until the common voice declared that he had changed only in appearance, which was natural, and had kept the promise of his boyhood for gayety of spirits, sweet singing, and fine dancing.
She ran to it with a cry a cry of recognition and a cry of terror in one. She dropped on her knees and laid that helpless head on her bosom, and kissed, with a sister's kisses, that cold, white cheek. "Oh, my darling!" she said. "Is it thus we meet again?" Yes! After all the years that had passed since the parting in the cabin of the ship, it was thus the two school-friends met again.
I used to feel as if I was not doing my part of a bargain it sounds horrid to put it like that, I know, but it was so when I took one of my old school-friends, who couldn't afford to travel, away to Italy for a month or two, and we went about cheaply all by ourselves, and were quite happy; or when I went and made a long stay in London with some quiet people who had known me all my life, and we all lived just as in the old days, when we had to think twice about seats at the theatre, and told each other about cheap dressmakers.
A walk, or an hour spent in a public garden in her mother's company; occasionally a concert or an opera, which never lasts later than nine or half-past nine; some holiday afternoon, a little gathering of young school-friends, to which gentlemen are not admitted; once or twice a year, perhaps, after she is fifteen, private theatricals or a soirée; where she appears in a simple dress, dances under her mother's care, and returns home at eleven o'clock.
She opened some little ivory tablets that lay on the dressing-table, scribbled in pencil on one of them, "I am gone to visit one of my school-friends," gathered a few toilet necessaries into a hand-bag, and not three minutes after that voice had been heard, her slim form, hastily wrapped up from observation, might have been seen passing out of the back door of Melbury's house.
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