Chapter 23
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,
