“On the day when he went away, Laura went up and kissed him with tears in her eyes. ‘You know how long I have been wanting to do it,’ this lady said to her husband.”
“She fairly gave way to tears as she spoke; and for me, I longed to kiss the hem of her robe, or anything else she would let me embrace, I was so happy, and so touched by the simple demeanor and affection of the noble young lady.”
“Ethel walked slowly up to the humble bed, and sat down on a chair near it. No doubt her heart prayed for him who slept there; she turned round where his black Pensioner’s cloak was hanging on the wall, and lifted up the homely garment and kissed it. The servant looked on, admiring, I should think, her melancholy and her gracious beauty.”
From Thackeray to Charles Dickens the transition is easy and pleasant. The difficulty, in both cases, is to limit the number of our extracts. These are from “Nicholas Nickleby:”
“It was very little that Nicholas knew of the world, but he guessed enough about its ways to think that if he gave Miss La Creevy one little kiss, perhaps she might not be the less kindly disposed towards those he was leaving behind. So he gave her three or four with a kind of jocose gallantry, and Miss La Creevy evinced no greater symptoms of displeasure than declaring, as she adjusted her yellow turban, that she had never heard of such a thing, and couldn’t have believed it possible.”