“Who taught me to be hard?” returned Estella.  “Who praised me when I learnt my lesson?”

“But to be proud and hard to me!” Miss Havisham quite shrieked, as she stretched out her arms.  “Estella, Estella, Estella, to be proud and hard to me!”

Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm wonder, but was not otherwise disturbed; when the moment was past, she looked down at the fire again.

“I cannot think,” said Estella, raising her eyes after a silence “why you should be so unreasonable when I come to see you after a separation.  I have never forgotten your wrongs and their causes.  I have never been unfaithful to you or your schooling.  I have never shown any weakness that I can charge myself with.”

“Would it be weakness to return my love?” exclaimed Miss Havisham.  “But yes, yes, she would call it so!”

“I begin to think,” said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment of calm wonder, “that I almost understand how this comes about.  If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight by which she had never once seen your face — if you had done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry?”

Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.

“Or,” said Estella, " — which is a nearer case — if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her; — if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?”

Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could not see her face), but still made no answer.

“So,” said Estella, “I must be taken as I have been made.  The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how, upon the floor, among the faded bridal relics with which it was strewn.  I took advantage of the moment — I had sought one from the first — to leave the room, after beseeching Estella’s attention to her, with a movement of my hand.  When I left, Estella was yet standing by the great chimney-piece, just as she had stood throughout.  Miss Havisham’s grey hair was all adrift upon the ground, among the other bridal wrecks, and was a miserable sight to see.