Great Expectations

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where

suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual, and I

returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three

hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it

was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;

that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I

should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two

occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,

it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my

mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud

and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence

of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not

met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that,

of all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in

my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I

sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled

its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was

coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free

from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw

her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?