Summers and winters slipped by lazily enough, as the years seemed always to crawl round at Norton Bury. How things went in the outside world I little knew or cared. My father lived his life, mechanical and steady as clock-work, and we two, John Halifax and Phineas Fletcher, lived our lives—the one so active and busy, the other so useless and dull. Neither of us counted the days, nor looked backwards or forwards.
One June morning I woke to the consciousness that I was twenty years old, and that John Halifax was—a man: the difference between us being precisely as I have expressed it.
Our birthdays fell within a week of each other, and it was in remembering his—the one which advanced him to the dignity of eighteen—that I called to mind my own. I say, "advanced him to the dignity"—but in truth that is an idle speech; for any dignity which the maturity of eighteen may be supposed to confer he had already in possession. Manhood had come to him, both in character and demeanour, not as it comes to most young lads, an eagerly-desired and presumptuously-asserted claim, but as a rightful inheritance, to be received humbly, and worn simply and naturally. So naturally, that I never seemed to think of him as anything but a boy, until this one June Sunday, when, as before stated, I myself became twenty years old.
I was talking over that last fact, in a rather dreamy mood, as he and I sat in our long-familiar summer seat, the clematis arbour by the garden wall.
"It seems very strange, John, but so it is—I am actually twenty."
"Well, and what of that?"
I sat looking down into the river, which flowed on, as my years were flowing, monotonous, dark, and slow,—as they must flow on for ever. John asked me what I was thinking of.
"Of myself: what a fine specimen of the noble genus homo I am."
I spoke bitterly, but John knew how to meet that mood. Very patient he was with it and with every ill mood of mine. And I was grateful, with that deep gratitude we feel to those who bear with us, and forgive us, and laugh at us, and correct us,—all alike for love.
"Self-investigation is good on birthdays. Phineas, here goes for a catalogue of your qualities, internal and external."