Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much
surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather
perplexed expression of face, and with his very gray hair
disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to
putting anything straight.
Chapter XXIII
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.
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