By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was
slow to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less
weak, and Joe stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.
For, the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my
need, that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk
to me in the old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in
the old unassertive protecting way, so that I would half believe
that all my life since the days of the old kitchen was one of the
mental troubles of the fever that was gone. He did everything for
me except the household work, for which he had engaged a very
decent woman, after paying off the laundress on his first arrival.
"Which I do assure you, Pip," he would often say, in explanation of
that liberty; "I found her a tapping the spare bed, like a cask of
beer, and drawing off the feathers in a bucket, for sale. Which she
would have tapped yourn next, and draw'd it off with you a laying
on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally in the
souptureen and wegetable-dishes, and the wine and spirits in your
Wellington boots."
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