der if you might be planning
and contriving to have a pleasant home of your own one of these days,
when you're tired of all this work."

Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and
actually drew a sigh. "Pip," said he, "we won't talk about 'poor
dreams;' you know more about such things than I, having much fresher
experience of that kind. But now about this other matter. I'll put a
case to you. Mind! I admit nothing."

He waited for me to declare that I quite understood that he expressly
said that he admitted nothing.

"Now, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, "put this case. Put the case that a
woman, under such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her child
concealed, and was obliged to communicate the fact to her legal adviser,
on his representing to her that he must know, with an eye to the
latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about that child. Put the
case that, at the same time he held a trust to find a child for an
eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up."

"I follow you, sir."

"Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he
saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain
destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at
a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that
he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported,
neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing
up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw
in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much
spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,--to be
prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow."

"I follow you, sir."

"Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the
heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make
no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this
power: "I know what you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, you
did such and such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through
it all, and I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should
be necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced.
Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If
you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is
still saved." Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was