A regular account of my doings during my stay at uncle Dick’s house would be rather wearisome. It would be a different matter if I had the ability to make the record as pleasant as the experience.

One or two neighbours were disposed to be friendly; but unfortunately, they were people Theresa didn’t care about. My kind-hearted uncle appeared to regret the general want of cordiality for my sake.

“In other places,” he said, “some kind of fun is always to be got; pic-nics, lawn-parties, and so forth. But the utmost civilities we are accustomed to, here, are sometimes a bow, and at long intervals, a visit.”

I assured him that I wanted no other and no better society than himself and his daughter.

“Still,” said he, “I should like to have given a party of some kind for you. But if I wanted to fill my rooms, I should have to hunt for my guests in the highways and under the hedges. There are not half-a-dozen creatures in the district to whom I would offer a glass of wine.”

“English society appears to me intolerably exclusive.”“Ay,” he answered, “your self-made men know that. In the provinces there is nothing harder to get than society. A man must live in a place half his life before he can gather people about him, and then his antecedents must be unimpeachable. Provincial society consists of coteries, all absurdly jealous and suspicious of intruders. I parted with some pleasant friends when I left ——; but how many years I shall have to live here before the people whose acquaintance is desirable will honour me with their friendship I cannot imagine. Money will not bring society, and mere respectability takes time to make itself known. Nothing but a title or unquestionable aristocratic connexions bring people about you at once. Ah! we’re a sad set of toadies in this country; and yet, though I occasionally grumble, I am satisfied that society should remain as it is. The social successes of moneyed interlopers have done a great deal, since I was a boy, to demoralise the tone of English society. The world is lumbered with parvenus; and though I am a City man myself, I am conservative enough in my views of life never to regret any illustration, on the part of society, of a resolution to resist the encroachments of the City.”

“Getting into Parliament seems a good way of getting into society,” said I.

“The great way. I will venture to say that a third of the members of the House sit for social, not for political, aims, of which they know nothing. However, I never hear of some notorious company-monger, some rascal the very magnitude of whose robberies preserves him from the law, getting into Parliament, without consoling myself with the reflection that there is a special constituency of blackguards in this country whose interests ought to be represented as well as those of the honester classes, and that the swindler, the company-maker, the Stock Exchange hocusser, are the right men for it.”

Yet in spite of my uncle’s reasoning, his neighbours were not more to blame than he was for unsociability. He was so good-hearted a man, so excellent a host, so cheerful and amiable a companion, that he could have found no difficulty in procuring friends had he made the effort. In truth, neither he nor his daughter cared for society. They were both easily bored, as I noticed once when some people called. These people were fresh from London, and could talk of nothing but the impertinences of the season. My uncle laughed at them when they were gone, and asked me what manner of sin he should commit in order to expiate the perpetration of entertaining such people at his house?

The letter I had written to Conny remained unanswered. Every hour of the days that followed, I looked forward to receiving her answer. Her silence mortified me. I thought her cruel to neglect me, knowing what my feelings were. I pored over her picture, afflicting my common sense with all manner of silly questions. She had given me quite enough encouragement to lead me to believe that she was very nearly in love with me, and what I wanted to know was, Was she a flirt? and had she humoured my passion only to make an ass of me?

I had confidently reckoned upon receiving an answer to my letter. Had her father forbidden her to write? No; that was improbable. He certainly would not wish her to treat me with rudeness. I grew jealous, uneasy, angry. Suppose all the time she had been allowing me to make love to her, she was pledged to Curling, was corresponding with him, was meeting him! How detestable to be tricked! How odious to pour your soft adoration into the ears of a woman who is laughing in her sleeve at your nonsense, and thinking, at the very moment you consider yourself most eloquent, how much better the other fellow expresses the same sentiments!Lovers can never be ridiculous in each other’s eyes, if both are in earnest. But if one is insincere, then the other is inevitably absurd. So two mad people explaining to each other, the one his claims to the English throne, the other his claims to the moon as a family estate, listen with gravity, embrace with sympathy, and part with mutual admiration. But a lunatic, talking his nonsense to a sane man, is pitied and despised.

Oh, who that has been in love hasn’t suffered? Where is he? I would walk ten miles on the hottest July day to behold him. I say, it is impossible to love and not to suffer. Thy goddess is a divinity hedged about with furze, and whatever be thy fortune with her, inevitably art thou bound to carry away scars and blisters and wounds. Nay, madam, I never said that these sufferings, these agonies, were confined to one sex. You take your share; you, too, have your lacerations, your sleepless nights, your heavy eyelids. There is a Jack for every Jill—a Jill for every Jack. But do your sufferings mitigate ours? Does Sylvia weeping over Alexis’ cruel marriage with Phyllis, comfort Phoebus, who blubbers over Delia’s engagement to Hylas? Oh, this is a vale of tears! let us silence recrimination—and weep, if not in each other’s arms, at least for one another.

Nobody knows—nobody ever will know—and nobody had better ask—how I suffered (intermittently) whilst I waited for the letter I never got. “She doesn’t care for me!” I would cry. “She is in love with Curling. She has forgotten my very name. Or worse, she remembers me only to divert that rascally cashier, whom she meets, God knows how and where, with demure travesties of my pretty whispers.” And then—my imagination being always briskest when I was saddest, resembling a cat, that is friskiest at night—up would spring a vision: Conny with her sweet, deep eyes, her shining tresses, her adorable little figure, made love to by Curling, of the frizzy hair and pigeon-pie-shaped bosom; watching him (faugh!) with the divinest meaning in those eyes, into whose depths I had so often gazed, and gazed, and gazed, and still found nothing but a vacuum of moist and lambent blue! Then, Eugenio, would I clench my hands, and grind my teeth; then would I consign Mr. Curling’s soul to Mephistopheles, and hold an Imaginary Conversation with the faithless one, superior in wit, nature, satire, and the received beauties, to anything ever written by Savage Landor; in which I would now wither her with sarcasms, and now revive her with splendid entreaties, now overwhelm her with contempt, and now restore her with the most luxuriant tenderness.

Did you never indulge in these mental strifes? Then you have never been in love. Who that has been in love has not morally wrestled with his goddess, as fanatically as ever Luther wrestled with the Devil? Don’t say you trusted her. Don’t outrage experience by pretending that you always had the most unbounded confidence in her. You know you hadn’t. You know when you left her for a week, that you thought, that day, of the party she was going; to next evening, of the men she would meet there, of the waltzes she would dance there, of the conservatory she would retire to. Again, when you were miles away, don’t you remember thinking: “To-day is Lady Sloper’s picnic; Aurelia is going; she will meet that beast Lovall; she will come home by moonlight in a crowded vehicle, the beast Lovall at her side, while her mamma, her only protector, slumbers a mile behind in the slow omnibus.” Pshaw! he that writes this has gone through it all, and what consolation, fellow-sufferers, has he to offer you? Dean Swift said of the weather, “I never remember any weather not too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry; but, however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.”

So of love; at the end of the year ’tis all very well.

END OF VOL. II.

CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.