When I finished my penultimate college paper last week, I retired to the Winthrop House Library for a study break. After scanning the shelves of English and American literature and deciding that I wasnt quite bored enough to make Henry James seem like a good idea, I emerged with the first volume of the centenary edition of Charles Dickens Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation.

Initially, I had reservations about the book; Dombey and Son is sort of second-tier Dickens, with especially broad characterizations and implausibly-integrated subplots. Buthaving already worked my way through first-tier DickensI persevered. Before long, I fell happily into the Dickensian rhythm: there were the requisite good lower-orders types and bad lower-orders types, the requisite super-virtuous young woman, the requisite scheming villains who would, I knew, ultimately be vanquished. By the time that the frail, angelic Paul Dombey (so frail and so angelic that his doom was assured from his first appearance in the novel that begins with his birth) finally dies in his sisters arms, midway through Volume I, I found myself brushing away tears.

When I finished Dombey and Sons, I slid the green-bound volumes back next to Great Expectations with a sense of regret. Part of what I love about Dickens novels is their combination of predictability and novelty. Innocents will be menaced, but theyll come through all right or else die heart-rendingly; a young woman will be a paragon of moral virtue; there will be a cast of dozens, representative of several levels of British society. But there will be in that cast one or two really unforgettable characters, and sometimes the innocents will be menaced in really novel ways. And because I love this combination of the familiar and the novel, I replaced Dombey and Sons with real regret, noticing how few unread volumes of Dickens remained.

Next fall, for the first time in 18 or so years, I wont be heading to school. I wont buy notebooks or sourcebooks; I will not buy or sharpen a fistful of number two pencils. I will not, come September, plan an outfit to wear on the first day of school. And so a pattern that has been varied and repeated with the pleasant regularity of Dickens novels through most of my life will be broken. I am not scared so much as I am bemused. I do not have a template for whatever will happen next.

On Wednesday, a couple of my roommates and I braved a noreaster to visit all of the House libraries in an expedition we variously called a library safari and a lib crawl, packing, as provisions, a bottle of rum. It had been on our list of things to do before we graduated. We climbed spiral staircases; we poked into the back of stacks, tipping books from the shelves at random in the hope of opening doors to secret passages. We pretended to shut each other in the vault in the basement of the Kirkland library. We passed the rum in the second-floor stacks of the Eliot library. By the time we returned to Winthrop, tired and damp from the driving rain, I was both glad to have gone on the tour and glad to be done with it. The libraries had their charmsthe spiral staircases in the stacks, the housemasters smiling down at us from their portraits on the walls, the people who were still studying for exams looking up at us crosslybut after a while, they became interchangeable.

As I reached the end of Dombey and Son last week, I read more and more slowly, putting the book down at increasingly frequent intervals. I wasnt ready to finish; I wasnt ready to abandon Florence or Walter or Captain Cuttle or Mr. Toots or Florences snappish-but-faithful dog, Diogenes. But people married and reconciled and died and before I knew it the book was over. It ended as many of Dickens novels end, with the older generation fading to insignificance, their wrongs righted or forgotten, and the younger generation brave and happy, ready to strike out on their own. And as I closed Dombey and Son, my regret was mingled with fierce curiosity about their fates, and a sense that the unwritten part of their livesthe part that did not hew to the Dickensian pattern I knew so wellmight be more interesting than the part that had preceded it.

Phoebe Kosman 05 is a history and literature concentrator in Wintrhop House. Her column appears regularly.