In chapter X of Wodehouse's 1933 novel Heavy Weather the Hon. Galahad Threepwood and Lady Julia Fish discuss the romance between Lady Julia's son Ronnie and Sue Brown, daughter of an old flame of Gally's. As often happens with these siblings, they go at each other tooth and claw:
"You have been taking a lot of trouble to ruin this girl's happiness these last few days, and now you are getting official intimation that you haven't succeeded. They are all right, those two. Sweethearts still is the term."
The Hon. Galahad spread his coat-tails to the invisible blaze and resumed.
"The other thing I came to say is that there must be no more of this nonsense. If you have objections to young Ronnie marrying Sue, don't mention them to him. It worries him and makes him moody, and that worries Sue and makes her unhappy, and that worries me and spoils my day. You understand?"
Lady Julia was shaken, but she had not lost her spirit.
"I'm afraid you must make up your mind to having your days spoiled, Galahad."
"You don’t mean that even after this you intend to keep making a pest of yourself?"
"You put these things so badly. What you are trying to say, I imagine is, do I still intend to give my child a mother's advice? Certainly I do. A boy’s best friend is his mother, don't you sometimes think? Ronnie, handicapped by being virtually half-witted, may not have seen fit to take my advice as yet; but if in the old days you ever had a moment to spare from your life-work of being thrown out of shady night-clubs and were able to look in at the Adelphi Theatre, you may remember the expression 'A time will come!'"
The "term" quoted by Galahad, Sweethearts Still, is the title of a song of their youth by Arthur J. Greenish (1883). While it is true that Greenish didn't coin the phrase, the spike in occurrences of the phrase after that date shows that was the song that popularized it. The first verse goes:
Sweethearts still as in our youth,
Resting on each other's truth;
Darling let me take the hand,
Dearest still in all the land;
Care must choose its greatest ill,
Since we twain are sweethearts still.
Many compositions during the following decades use the phrase for this theme of the continuation of romance in old age: it is found in several poems (e.g. 1883, 1890, 1893), or this 1916 etching by W. Dendy Sadler:
Wodehouse, in contrast, normally applies it to young couples reconciled after a crisis, as here, in Piccadilly Jim ch. XXVI, Summer Lightning ch. I §4, etc.
Lady Julia (perhaps knowingly) replies with another Victorian song title, A Boy's Best Friend is His Mother. There were at least two of these. The first (1883), by Harry Miller and J. P. Skelly, begins:
While plodding on our way, the toilsome road of life,
How few the friends that daily there we meet!
Not many will stand by in trouble and in strife,
With counsel and affection ever sweet!
But there is one whose smile will ever on us beam
Whose love is dearer far than any other!
And wherever we may turn this lesson we will hear,
A boy's best friend is his Mother.
The second (1884), by Ben Williams:
I've been thinking of late, of the time that's pass'd away,
Of friends in whom I could confide;
Of my dear old mother's knee which around I used to play;
How I miss'd her sweet face when she died!
How well her I loved no one can tell;
Like her I could never love another!
It always gave her joy to kiss her darling boy
A boy's best friend is his mother!
The line is also used in Piccadilly Jim, "The Man Who Married a Hotel", Sam in the Suburbs and "The Man Who Gave Up Smoking" (and will be familiar to many people from a scene in Alfred Hitchcock's classic horror film Psycho.)
Finally, Lady Julia herself provides the source of her last threat, "A time will come": the melodrama of the 19th century, one of whose main venues was the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand. This does not belong to one drama in particular, but is a stock phrase that characterized the villain of the piece, as we learn from a number of references:
A few years ago the villain used to be blessed with a hopeful and philosophical temperament, which enabled him to bear up under these constantly recurring disappointments and reverses. It was "no matter," he would say. Crushed for the moment though he might be, his buoyant heart never lost courage. He had a simple, childlike faith in Providence. "A time will come," he would remark, and this idea consoled him. (J. K. Jerome, “The Villain”, in Stage-Land, 1889)
Most of them are reduced to muttering, like the villain in the old melodrama, "a time will come." (G. K. Chesterton, "My Six Conversions. II: When the World Turned Back", in The Well and the Shallows, 1935)
Melodrama villain, from Stage-Land,
ill. by J. B. Partridge.
Other occurrences of the phrase in Wodehouse include his stories "Business Begins" and "An Affair of Boats"; compare also "mark my words, a time may come, and then . . ." in The Little Warrior.
So, the argument between these two representatives of a bygone era is dotted with memories of their salad days. What is ironic is that Lady Julia, by using the phrase and mentioning its context, unwittingly places herself in the role of the villain of the novel.
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