Great Expectations

"Till you're a gentleman," said Biddy.

"You know I never shall be, so that's always. Not that I have any

occasion to tell you anything, for you know everything I know,--as I

told you at home the other night."

"Ah!" said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the ships.

And then repeated, with her former pleasant change, "shall we walk a

little farther, or go home?"

I said to Biddy we would walk a little farther, and we did so, and the

summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very

beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and

wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing

beggar my neighbor by candle-light in the room with the stopped clocks,

and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if

I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances

and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do,

and stick to it, and make the best of it. I asked myself the question

whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that

moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to

admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, "Pip,

what a fool you are!"

We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed

right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and

somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no

pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own

breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much

the better of the two?

"Biddy," said I, when we were walking homeward, "I wish you could put me

right."

"I wish I could!" said Biddy.

"If I could only get myself to fall in love with you,--you don't mind my

speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?"

"Oh dear, not at all!" said Biddy. "Don't mind me."

"If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me."

"But you never will, you see," said Biddy.

It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have

done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed

I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and she said it

decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it

rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on the point.