Great Expectations

Dinner was laid in the best of these rooms; the second was his

dressing-room; the third, his bedroom. He told us that he held the whole

house, but rarely used more of it than we saw. The table was comfortably

laid--no silver in the service, of course--and at the side of his chair

was a capacious dumb-waiter, with a variety of bottles and decanters on

it, and four dishes of fruit for dessert. I noticed throughout, that he

kept everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself.

There was a bookcase in the room; I saw from the backs of the books,

that they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal biography, trials,

acts of Parliament, and such things. The furniture was all very solid

and good, like his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and

there was nothing merely ornamental to be seen. In a corner was a little

table of papers with a shaded lamp: so that he seemed to bring the

office home with him in that respect too, and to wheel it out of an

evening and fall to work.

As he had scarcely seen my three companions until now,--for he and I had

walked together,--he stood on the hearth-rug, after ringing the bell,

and took a searching look at them. To my surprise, he seemed at once to

be principally if not solely interested in Drummle.

"Pip," said he, putting his large hand on my shoulder and moving me to

the window, "I don't know one from the other. Who's the Spider?"

"The spider?" said I.

"The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow."

"That's Bentley Drummle," I replied; "the one with the delicate face is

Startop."

Not making the least account of "the one with the delicate face," he

returned, "Bentley Drummle is his name, is it? I like the look of that

fellow."

He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his

replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw

discourse out of him. I was looking at the two, when there came between

me and them the housekeeper, with the first dish for the table.

She was a woman of about forty, I supposed,--but I may have thought her

younger than she was. Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely

pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair. I cannot

say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be

parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression

of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at

the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if

it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out

of the Witches' caldron.