Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that caring for others is sometimes not as genuine or deeply felt when it's second-hand, similar to wearing used clothes.
In this quote, Charles Dickens highlights the nature of relationships and emotional investments. He implies that caring for someone in a superficial or distant way—like wearing hand-me-down clothes—can seem easy and transient. In contrast, true caring requires a deeper, more genuine connection that is not easily cast aside. The metaphor of second-hand items suggests that such cares lack the authenticity and personal attachment found in genuine relationships.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of genuine connections in our lives.
I recollected one story there was in the village, how that on a certain night in the year (it might be that very night for anything I knew), all the dead people came out of the ground and sat at the heads of their own graves till morning.
A silent look of affection and regard when all other eyes are turned coldly away-the consciousness that we possess the sympathy and affection of one being when all others have deserted us-is a hold, a stay, a comfort, in the deepest affliction, which no wealth could purchase, or power bestow.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.
You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” said Miss Pross, in her breathing. “Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.
Christmas is a poor excuse every 25th of December to pick a man's pockets.
Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.
Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.
There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.
...because he had been waiting for someone to come back to him, so every time someone knocked on the door, he couldn't stop himself from hoping it might be that person, even though he knew he shouldn't hope.
The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.
Man's feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell.
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