"Very much," said Estella, looking at me.

"Less coarse and common?" said Miss Havisham, playing with
Estella's hair.

Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed
again, and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a
boy still, but she lured me on.

We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which
had so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come
home from France, and that she was going to London. Proud and
wilful as of old, she had brought those qualities into such
subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature -
or I thought so - to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was
impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched
hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood
- from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had first made me
ashamed of home and Joe - from all those visions that had raised
her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the
wooden window of the forge and flit away. In a word, it was
impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present,
from the innermost life of my life.

It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the day,
and return to the hotel at night, and to London to-morrow. When we
had conversed for a while, Miss Havisham sent us two out to walk in
the neglected garden: on our coming in by-and-by, she said, I