I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy.  Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be; but it is possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dissatisfied with myself.

Anyhow, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand, looking into the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and about what they should do without me, and all that.  And whenever I caught one of them looking at me, though never so pleasantly (and they often looked at me — particularly Biddy), I felt offended:  as if they were expressing some mistrust of me.  Though Heaven knows they never did by word or sign.

At those times I would get up and look out at the door; for, our kitchen door opened at once upon the night, and stood open on summer evenings to air the room.  The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid I took to be but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic objects among which I had passed my life.

“Saturday night,” said I, when we sat at our supper of bread-and-cheese and beer.  “Five more days, and then the day before the day!  They’ll soon go.”

“Yes, Pip,” observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer mug.  “They’ll soon go.”

“Soon, soon go,” said Biddy.

“I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and order my new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I’ll come and put them on there, or that I’ll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook’s.  It would be very disagreeable to be stared at by all the people here.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new genteel figure too, Pip,” said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper as if he thought of the time when we used to compare slices.  “So might Wopsle.  And the Jolly Bargemen might take it as a compliment.”

“That’s just what I don’t want, Joe.  They would make such a business of it — such a coarse and common business — that I couldn’t bear myself.”

“Ah, that indeed, Pip!” said Joe.  “If you couldn’t abear yourself—­”

Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister’s plate, “Have you thought about when you’ll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your sister, and me?  You will show yourself to us; won’t you?”

“Biddy,” I returned with some resentment, “you are so exceedingly quick that it’s difficult to keep up with you.”

("She always were quick,” observed Joe.)

“If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me say that I shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening — most likely on the evening before I go away.”

Biddy said no more.  Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an affectionate good-night with her and Joe, and went up to bed.  When I got into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean little room that I should soon be parted from and raised above, for ever, It was furnished with fresh young remembrances too, and even at the same moment I fell into much the same confused division of mind between it and the better rooms to which I was going, as I had been in so often between the forge and Miss Havisham’s, and Biddy and Estella.