aded lamp: so that he seemed to bring the
office home with him in that respect too, and to wheel it out of an
evening and fall to work.

As he had scarcely seen my three companions until now,--for he and I had
walked together,--he stood on the hearth-rug, after ringing the bell,
and took a searching look at them. To my surprise, he seemed at once to
be principally if not solely interested in Drummle.

"Pip," said he, putting his large hand on my shoulder and moving me to
the window, "I don't know one from the other. Who's the Spider?"

"The spider?" said I.

"The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow."

"That's Bentley Drummle," I replied; "the one with the delicate face is
Startop."

Not making the least account of "the one with the delicate face," he
returned, "Bentley Drummle is his name, is it? I like the look of that
fellow."

He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his
replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw
discourse out of him. I was looking at the two, when there came between
me and them the housekeeper, with the first dish for the table.

She was a woman of about forty, I supposed,--but I may have thought her
younger than she was. Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely
pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair. I cannot
say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
of the Witches' caldron.

She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished. We took our seats
at the round table, and my guardian kept Drummle on one side of him,
while Startop sat on the other. It was a noble dish of fish that the
housekeeper had put on table, and we had a joint of equally choice
mutton afterwards, and then an equally choice bird. Sauces, wines, all
the accessories we wanted, and all of the best, were given out by our
host from his dumb-waiter; and when they had made the circuit of the
table, he always put them back again. Similarly, he dealt us clean
plates and knives and forks, for each course, and dropped those just
disused into two baskets on the ground by his c