"What are you a-telling of, Pip?" cried Joe. "You don't mean to say it!"
"But not all of it? Why, sure you don't mean to say, Pip, that there was no black welvet co-ch?" For I stood there shaking my head. "But at least there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip, if there warn't no weal cutlets, at least there was dogs? A puppy, come."
"No, Joe," I said. "There was nothing of the kind."
As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on him, he looked at me in dismay. "Pip, old chap," he said, "this won't do, I say. Where do you expect to go to? What possessed you?"
"I don't know what possessed me," I replied, hanging my head, "but I wish you hadn't taught me to call knaves at cards Jacks, and I wish my boots weren't so thick, nor my hands so coarse."
Then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, but I hadn't liked to tell Mrs. Joe and Uncle Pumblechook about the beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's who was so proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the lies had come out of it somehow, though I didn't know how.
"Well," said Joe after a good deal of thought, "there's one thing you may be sure of, Pip, namely, that lies is lies. Howsoever they come, they didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies and work round to the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. They ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make it out at all clear. You're sure an uncommon scholar."
This I denied in the face of Joe's most forcible arguments, and at the end of our talk, I said, "You are not angry with me, Joe?"
"No, old chap, but if you can't get to being uncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip. Don't never do it no more."
When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I thought over Joe's advice and knew that it was right, and yet my mind was in such a disturbed and unthankful state, that for a long time I lay awake, not thinking over my sins, but still mourning that Joe and Mrs. Joe and I were all common.
That was a memorable day for me, and it wrought great changes in me. I began to see things and people from a new point of view, and from that day dates the beginning of my great expectations.