 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 passed, 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 has
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
