Chapter 14

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister’s temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.[69]

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should be very proud and happy when I enter the forge. Now the reality was quite different, I only felt that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal.

It was not because I was faithful, but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry,[70] but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked very hard.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would despise me. Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall which the wooden windows then were, and would believe that she had come at last.

After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal would have a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than ever.

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