Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to
see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile,
"an alarming personage." He was a young-looking man, in spite of
his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite
natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected;
there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have
been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very
near being so.
When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs.
Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were
black and handsome, "Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she
looked up from her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an
absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower
water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone
or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like
her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.
I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.
Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased
Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased
father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined
opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose,
if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord
Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had
tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite
supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming
the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address
engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of
some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the
trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to
be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things
must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of
plebeian domestic knowledge.
So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady
by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but
perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed,
in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was
also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount
to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the
one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had
taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would
seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of
the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or
withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them
after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was "a
treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure
in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought
him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the
object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married
a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving
reproach, because he had never got one.