Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual, and I
returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three
hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my
mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud
and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence
of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not
met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that,
of all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in
my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I
sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was
coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free
from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw
her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.
What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?