I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbor by candle-light in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella.

I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it, and make the best of it.

I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable?
I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, "Pip, what a fool you are!" We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed right.

Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own breast than mine.

How could it be, then, that I did not like her much the better of the two?
"Biddy," said I, when we were walking homeward, "I wish you could put me right." "I wish I could!" said Biddy.
"If I could only get myself to fall in love with you,--you don't mind my speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance ?" "Oh dear, not at all!" said Biddy.