Book I: “Les”
Reading edition
“I’m not a young man. … I had studied myself; I had had experience of myself; I knew how much I loved her, and how happy I should be. … But I had not—I feel it now—sufficiently considered her. … Did I consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved her, when everybody must, who knew her? … Did I consider that I took her—at her age…? I have not found it out before.”
Charles Dickens
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“The Cricket on the Hearth”