Great Expectations Chapter XII

In which we find the young narrator wrestling with a heavy conscience after a troublesome encounter, and gradually settling into a peculiar companionship with the rather enigmatic Miss Havisham and the capricious Estella, while his home life is marked by discord and uneasy expectations. The interlude is punctuated by curious customs, like a hauntingly subdued smith’s song, the odd exercise of pushing Miss Havisham in her wheeled garden-chair, and bitter domestic disputes stirred by the meddlesome Pumblechook.