lla was Mr. Pocket's sister. Georgiana, whom I
had seen at Miss Havisham's on the same occasion, also turned up. She
was a cousin,--an indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity
religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with the hatred of
cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon
me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as
a grown-up infant with no notion of his own interests, they showed the
complacent forbearance I had heard them express. Mrs. Pocket they
held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been heavily
disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon
themselves.

These were the surroundings among which I settled down, and applied
myself to my education. I soon contracted expensive habits, and began
to spend an amount of money that within a few short months I should have
thought almost fabulous; but through good and evil I stuck to my books.
There was no other merit in this, than my having sense enough to feel
my deficiencies. Between Mr. Pocket and Herbert I got on fast; and, with
one or the other always at my elbow to give me the start I wanted, and
clear obstructions out of my road, I must have been as great a dolt as
Drummle if I had done less.

I had not seen Mr. Wemmick for some weeks, when I thought I would write
him a note and propose to go home with him on a certain evening. He
replied that it would give him much pleasure, and that he would expect
me at the office at six o'clock. Thither I went, and there I found him,
putting the key of his safe down his back as the clock struck.

"Did you think of walking down to Walworth?" said he.

"Certainly," said I, "if you approve."

"Very much," was Wemmick's reply, "for I have had my legs under the desk
all day, and shall be glad to stretch them. Now, I'll tell you what I
have got for supper, Mr. Pip. I have got a stewed steak,--which is
of home preparation,--and a cold roast fowl,--which is from the
cook's-shop. I think it's tender, because the master of the shop was a
Juryman in some cases of ours the other day, and we let him down easy.
I reminded him of it when I bought the fowl, and I said, "Pick us out
a good one, old Briton, because if we had chosen to keep you in the box
another day or two, we could easily have done it." He said to that,
"Let me make you a present of the best fowl in the shop." I let him, of
course. As far as it goes, it's prope