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There was a clock in the outer wall of this house. Like
the clock in Miss Havisham's room, and like Miss Havisham's watch,
it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room
with a low ceiling, on the ground floor at the back. There was some
company in the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, "You
are to go and stand there, boy, till you are wanted." "There",
being the window, I crossed to it, and stood "there," in a very
uncomfortable state of mind, looking out.

It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of
the neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one
box tree that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and
had a new growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different
colour, as if that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan
and got burnt. This was my homely thought, as I contemplated the
box-tree. There had been some light snow, overnight, and it lay
nowhere else to my knowledge; but, it had not quite melted from the
cold shadow of this bit of garden, and the wind caught it up in
little eddies and threw it at the window, as if it pelted me for
coming there.

I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and
that its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of
the room except the shining of the fire in the window glass, but I
stiffened in all my joints with the consciousness that I was under
close inspection.

There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had
been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to
me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them
pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs:
because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made
him or her out to be a toady and humbug.

They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody's
pleasure, and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite
rigidly to repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very
much reminded me of my sister, with the difference that she was
older, and (as I found when I caught sight of her) of a blunter
cast of features. Indeed, when I knew her better I began to think
it was a Mercy she had any features at all, so very blank and high
was the dead wall of her face.

"Poor dear soul!" said this lady, with an abruptness of manner
quite my sister's. "Nobody's enemy but his own!"

"It would be much more commendable to be somebody else's enemy,"
said the gentleman; "far more natural."

"Cousin Raymond," observed another lady, "we are to love our
neighbour."

"Sarah Pocket," returned Cousin Raymond, "if a man is not his own
neighbour, who is?"

Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a
yawn), "The idea!" But I thought they seemed to think it rather a
good idea too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely
and emphatically, "Very true!"

"Poor soul!" Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been

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