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 chair.  No other attendant than the housekeeper appeared.  She set on every dish; and I always saw in her face, a face rising out of the caldron.  Years afterwards, I made a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair, to pass behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.

Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her own striking appearance and by Wemmick’s preparation, I observed that whenever she was in the room, she kept her eyes attentively on my guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she put before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back, and wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything to say.  I fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness of this, and a purpose of always holding her in suspense.