We owed so much to Herbert’s ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
– Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Chapter 58. After Pip moves to Egypt to work in the same firm as Herbert, he questions why he ever saw his friend as inept in business and financial matters. Earlier in the story Pip commented that Herbert would “never be very successful or rich.” In this later moment of self-realization, a more mature Pip sees that he was the one with the lack of aptitude.