I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her.  That she had done a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well.  But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker; I knew equally well.  And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

“Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know what I had done.  What have I done!  What have I done!” And so again, twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!

“Miss Havisham,” I said, when her cry had died away, “you may dismiss me from your mind and conscience.  But Estella is a different case, and if you can ever undo any scrap of what you have done amiss in keeping a part of her right nature away from her, it will be better to do that, than to bemoan the past through a hundred years.”

“Yes, yes, I know it.  But, Pip — my Dear!” There was an earnest womanly compassion for me in her new affection.  “My Dear!  Believe this:  when she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own.  At first I meant no more.”

“Well, well!” said I.  “I hope so.”

“But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.”

“Better,” I could not help saying, “to have left her a natural heart, even to be bruised or broken.”

With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and then burst out again, What had she done!

“If you knew all my story,” she pleaded, “you would have some compassion for me and a better understanding of me.”

“Miss Havisham,” I answered, as delicately as I could, “I believe I may say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I first left this neighbourhood.  It has inspired me with great commiseration, and I hope I understand it and its influences.  Does what has passed between us give me any excuse for asking you a question relative to Estella?  Not as she is, but as she was when she first came here?”

She was seated on the ground, with her arms on the ragged chair, and her head leaning on them.  She looked full at me when I said this, and replied, “Go on.”