beggar my neighbor by candlelight 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 today and somebody else tomorrow; 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.