One more passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Early life is like a chapter out of Dickens, I think — one sees people then: their tricks of expression, their vivid sayings, and their quaint humours and oddities do not surprise one; one accepts everything as a matter of course — no matter how unusual it may be. Later in life one grows more fastidious, more ambitious, more paradoxical: one begins to judge, or to make excuses, or to think about one's companions instead of merely staring at them. All these people we now saw for the first time, vivid but mysterious apparitions; we didn't know what they were feeling and thinking about, only we saw them, and very delightful they all were to look at.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1895), 227–28

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