"Remember!" said Joe. "I believe you! Wonderful!"
"It's a terrible thing, Joe. It ain't true."
"What are you a-telling of, Pip?" cried Joe. "You don't mean to say it!"
"Yes, I do;--it's lies, Joe."
"But not all of it? Why, sure you don't mean to say, Pip, that there was
no black welvet co-ch?" For I stood there shaking my head. "But at least
there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip, if there warn't no weal cutlets, at least
there was dogs? A puppy, come."
"No, Joe," I said. "There was nothing of the kind."
As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on him, he looked at me in dismay. "Pip, old
chap," he said, "this won't do, I say. Where do you expect to go to? What
possessed you?"
"I don't know what possessed me," I replied, hanging my head, "but I wish
you hadn't taught me to call knaves at cards Jacks, and I wish my boots
weren't so thick, nor my hands so coarse."
Then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, but I hadn't liked to tell
Mrs. Joe and Uncle Pumblechook about the beautiful young lady at Miss
Havisham's who was so proud, and that she had said I was common, and that
I wished I was not common, and that the lies had come out of it somehow,
though I didn't know how.
"Well," said Joe after a good deal of thought, "there's one thing you may
be sure of, Pip, namely, that lies is lies. Howsoever they come, they
didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies and work round
to the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. They ain't the way to get
out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out
at all clear. You're sure an uncommon scholar."
This I denied in the face of Joe's most forcible arguments, and at the end
of our talk, I said, "You are not angry with me, Joe?"
"No, old chap, but if you can't get to being uncommon through going
straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell
no more on 'em, Pip. Don't never do it no more."
When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I thought over Joe's
advice and knew that it was right, and yet my mind was in such a disturbed
and unthankful state, that for a long time I lay awake, not thinking over
my sins, but still mourning that Joe and Mrs. Joe and I were all common.
That was a memorable day for me, and it wrought great changes in me. I
began to see things and people from a new point of view, and from that day
dates the beginning of my great expectations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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