"There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of

weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam

and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip."

I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she

stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the

side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must

necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded me,

and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room

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many hours.

"You are to wait here, you boy," said Estella; and disappeared and

closed the door.

I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my

coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was

not favorable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled

me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever

taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called

knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then

I should have been so too.

She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She

put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread

and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in

disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,--I

cannot hit upon the right name for the smart--God knows what its name

was,--that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the

girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them.

This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave a

contemptuous toss--but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure

that I was so wounded--and left me.

But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face

in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my

sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried.

As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so

bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that

needed counteraction.

My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in

which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is

nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be

only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child

is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many

hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within

myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with

injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my

sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had

cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her

no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces,

fasts, and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed

this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and

unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid

and very sensitive.




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