? ? ? ? 'You would not have seen them,' he returned. 'I detest this mongrel time, neither day nor night. How late you are! Where have you been?'
? ? ? ? 'I have been taking leave of my usual walk,' said I.
? ? ? ? 'And I have been sitting here,' said Steerforth, glancing round the room, 'thinking that all the people we found so glad on the night of our coming down, might - to judge from the present wasted air of the place - be dispersed, or dead, or come to I don't know what harm. David, I wish to God I had had a judicious father these last twenty years!'
? ? ? ? 'My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?'
? ? ? ? 'I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!' he exclaimed. 'I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!'
? ? ? ? There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.
? ? ? ? 'It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,' he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney-piece, with his face towards the fire, 'than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat, within the last half-hour!'
? ? ? ? I was so confounded by the alteration in him, that at first I could only observe him in silence, as he stood leaning his head upon his hand, and looking gloomily down at the fire.
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