its effect against the
pretty brown hair. "Your own, one day, my dear," she said, "and you will
use it well. Let me see you play cards with this boy."

"With this boy! Why, he is a common labouring boy!" then she asked, with
greatest disdain, "What do you play, boy?"

"Nothing but 'beggar my neighbour,' miss."

"Beggar him," said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards, and
Miss Havisham sat, corpse-like, watching as we played.

"He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy," said Estella, with disdain, before
the first game was out. "And what coarse hands he has, and what thick
boots!"

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before, but now I began
to notice them. Her contempt for me was so strong that I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I
knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong, and she denounced me for a
clumsy, stupid, labouring boy.

"You say nothing of her," remarked Miss Havisham to me. "She says many
hard things of you, yet you say nothing of her. What do you think of her?"

"I don't like to say," I stammered.

"Tell me in my ear," said Miss Havisham, bending down.

"I think she is very proud," I replied in a whisper--"and very pretty--and
very insulting."

"Anything else?"

"I think I should like to go home."

"You shall go soon," said Miss Havisham aloud. "Play the game out!" I
played the game to an end, and Estella beggared me.

"When shall I have you here again?" said Miss Havisham. "I know nothing of
the days of the week or of the 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
about and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip."

I followed Estella down as I had followed her up, and at last I stood
again in the glare of daylight which quite confounded me, for I felt as if
I had been in the candle-light of the strange room many hours.

"You are to wait here, you boy, you," said Estella, and disappeared in the
house. While she was gone I looked at my coarse hands and my common boots,
and they troubled me greatly.

I determined to ask Joe why he had taught me to call the picture-cards
Jacks. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then I
should have been so too. Estella came back with some bread and meat and a
little mug of beer which she set down as insolently as if I were a dog in
disgrace. I was so humiliat