hands before; but I began to consider them a
very indifferent pair. Her contempt was so
strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt,
as was only natural, when I knew she was lying
in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced
me for a stupid, clumsy labouring-boy.

"You say nothing of her," remarked Miss
Havisham to me, as she looked on. "She says
many hard things of you, but you say nothing
of her. What do you think of her?"

"I don't like to say," I stammered.

"Tell me in my ear," said Miss Havisham,
bending down.

"I think she is very proud," I replied, in a
whisper.

"Anything else?"

"I think she is very pretty."

"Anything else?"

"I think she is very insulting." (She was
looking at me then, with a look of supreme
aversion.)

"Anything else?"

"I think I should like to go home."

"And never see her again, though she is so
pretty?"

"I am not sure that I shouldn't like to see
her again, but I should like to go home now."

"You shall go soon," said Miss Havisham,
aloud. "Play the game out."

Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should
have felt almost sure that Miss Havisham's face
could not smile. It had dropped into a watchful
and brooding expression—most likely when
all the things about her had become transfixed—
and it looked as if nothing could ever lift it up
again. Her chest had dropped, so that she
stooped; and her voice had dropped, so that she
spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her;
altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped,
body and soul, within and without, under the
weight of a crushing blow.

I played the game to an end with Estella, and
she beggared me. She threw the cards down
on the table when she had won them all, as if
she despised them for having been won of me.

"When shall I have you here again?" said
Miss Havisham. "Let me think."

I was beginning to remind her that to-day was
Wednesday, when she checked me with her
former impatient movement of the fingers of her
right hand.

"There, there! I know nothing of days of
the week; I know nothing of weeks of the
year. Come again after six days. You hear?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Estella, take him down. Let him have
something to eat, and let him roam and look
about him while he eats. Go, Pip."

I followed the candle down, as I had followed
the candle up, and she stood it in the place
where we had found it. Until she opened the
side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking
about it, that it must necessarily be night-time.
The rush of the daylight quite confounded me,
and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight
of the strange room many hours.

"You are to wait here, you boy," said Estella;
and disappeared and closed the door.

I took the opportunity of being alone in
the court-yard, to look at my coarse hands and
my common boots. My opinion of those
accessories was not favourable. They had never
troubled me before, but they troubled me now,
as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe
why he had ever taught me to call those picture-
cards, Jacks, which ought to be called knaves.
I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly
brought up, and then I should have been so
too.

She came back, with some bread and meat and
a little mug of beer. She put the mug down
on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread
and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if
I were a dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated,
hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry—I cannot
hit upon the right name for the smart—God
knows what its name was—that tears started to
my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the
girl looked at me with a quick delight in having
been the cause of them. This gave me power
to keep them back and to look at her: so, she
gave a contemptuous toss—but with a sense, I
thought, of having made too sure that I was so
wounded—and left me.

But, when she was gone, I looked about me
for a place to hide my face in, and got behind
one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned
my sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my
forehead on it and cried. As I cried, I kicked
the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so
bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the
smart without a name, that needed counteraction.

My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive.
In the little world in which children
have their existence whosoever brings them
up, there is nothing so finely perceived and
so finely felt as injustice. It may be only
small injustice that the child can be exposed
to; but the child is small, and its world is
small, and its rocking-horse stands as many
hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned
Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained,
from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice.
I had known, from the time when I could
speak, that my sister, in her capricious and
violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
cherished a profound conviction that her bringing
me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up
by jerks. Through all my punishments,
disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential
performances, I had nursed this assurance; and
to my communing so much with it, in a solitary
and unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact
that I was morally timid and very sensitive.

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time,
by kicking them into the brewery wall, and
twisting them out of my hair, and then I
smoothed my face with my sleeve, and came
from behind the gate. The bread and meat
were acceptable, and the beer was warming and
tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about
me.