Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to

see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile,

"an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of

his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite

natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected;

there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have

been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very

near being so.

When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs.

Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were

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black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she

looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an

absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower

water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone

or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like

her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.

I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.

Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased

Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased

father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined

opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose,

if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord

Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had

tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite

supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming

the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address

engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of

some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the

trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to

be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things

must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of

plebeian domestic knowledge.

So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady

by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but

perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed,

in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was

also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount

to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the

one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had

taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would

seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of

the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or

withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them

after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a

treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure

in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought

him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the

object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married

a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving

reproach, because he had never got one.




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