Page 548 - david-copperfield

Trotwood. If you cannot confidently trust me, whom will
you trust?’
‘Ah, Agnes!’ I returned. ‘You are my good Angel!’
She smiled rather sadly, I thought, and shook her head.
‘Yes, Agnes, my good Angel! Always my good Angel!’
‘If I were, indeed, Trotwood,’ she returned, ‘there is one
thing that I should set my heart on very much.’
I looked at her inquiringly; but already with a foreknowl-
edge of her meaning.
‘On warning you,’ said Agnes, with a steady glance,
‘against your bad Angel.’
‘My dear Agnes,’ I began, ‘if you mean Steerforth -’
‘I do, Trotwood,’ she returned. ‘Then, Agnes, you wrong
him very much. He my bad Angel, or anyone’s! He, any-
thing but a guide, a support, and a friend to me! My dear
Agnes! Now, is it not unjust, and unlike you, to judge him
from what you saw of me the other night?’
‘I do not judge him from what I saw of you the other
night,’ she quietly replied.
‘From what, then?’
‘From many things - trifles in themselves, but they do
not seem to me to be so, when they are put together. I judge
him, partly from your account of him, Trotwood, and your
character, and the influence he has over you.’
There was always something in her modest voice that
seemed to touch a chord within me, answering to that sound
alone. It was always earnest; but when it was very earnest,
as it was now, there was a thrill in it that quite subdued me.
I sat looking at her as she cast her eyes down on her work; I