0 David Copperfield
‘By my look? Dear me, Copperfield, that’s sharp practice!
What do I mean by my look?’
‘Yes,’ said I. ‘By your look.’
He seemed very much amused, and laughed as heartily
as it was in his nature to laugh. After some scraping of his
chin with his hand, he went on to say, with his eyes cast
downward - still scraping, very slowly:
‘When I was but an umble clerk, she always looked down
upon me. She was for ever having my Agnes backwards and
forwards at her ouse, and she was for ever being a friend to
you, Master Copperfield; but I was too far beneath her, my-
self, to be noticed.’
‘Well?’ said I; ‘suppose you were!’
‘- And beneath him too,’ pursued Uriah, very distinctly,
and in a meditative tone of voice, as he continued to scrape
his chin.
‘Don’t you know the Doctor better,’ said I, ‘than to sup-
pose him conscious of your existence, when you were not
before him?’
He directed his eyes at me in that sidelong glance again,
and he made his face very lantern-jawed, for the greater
convenience of scraping, as he answered:
‘Oh dear, I am not referring to the Doctor! Oh no, poor
man! I mean Mr. Maldon!’
My heart quite died within me. All my old doubts and
apprehensions on that subject, all the Doctor’s happiness
and peace, all the mingled possibilities of innocence and
compromise, that I could not unravel, I saw, in a moment,
at the mercy of this fellow’s twisting.