CHARLES DICKENS DOMBEY AND SON CHAPTER I Dombey and ...

CHAPTER XIV
Paul grows more and more Old-fashioned, and goes Home for the Holidays
WHEN the Midsummer vacation approached, no indecent manifestations of joy
were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at Doctor
Blimber's. Any such violent expression as 'breaking up,' would have been
quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young gentlemen oozed
away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they never broke up. They would
have scorned the action.
Tozer, who was constantly galled and tormented by a starched white cambric
neckerchief, which he wore at the express desire of Mrs. Tozer, his parent,
who, designing him for the Church, was of opinion that he couldn't be in
that forward state of preparation too soon--Tozer said, indeed, that
choosing between two evils, he thought he would rather stay where he was,
than go home. However inconsistent this declaration might appear with that
passage in Tozer's Essay on the subject, wherein he had observed 'that the
thoughts of home and all its recollections, awakened in his mind the most
pleasing emotions of anticipation and delight,' and had also likened himself
to a Roman General, flushed with a recent victory over the Iceni, or laden
with Carthaginian spoil, advancing within a few hours' march of the Capitol,
presupposed, for the purposes of the simile, to be the dwelling-place of
Mrs. Tozer, still it was very sincerely made. For it seemed that Tozer had a
dreadful uncle, who not only volunteered examinations of him, in the
holidays, on abstruse points, but twisted innocent events and things, and
wrenched them to the same fell purpose. So that if this uncle took him to
the Play, or, on a similar pretence of kindness, carried him to see a Giant,