Page 688 - david-copperfield

inconsiderate young people, fairly and full grown, to see
any natural feeling in a little thing like me! They make a
plaything of me, use me for their amusement, throw me
away when they are tired, and wonder that I feel more than
a toy horse or a wooden soldier! Yes, yes, that’s the way. The
old way!’
‘It may be, with others,’ I returned, ‘but I do assure you it
is not with me. Perhaps I ought not to be at all surprised to
see you as you are now: I know so little of you. I said, with-
out consideration, what I thought.’
‘What can I do?’ returned the little woman, standing up,
and holding out her arms to show herself. ‘See! What I am,
my father was; and my sister is; and my brother is. I have
worked for sister and brother these many years - hard, Mr.
Copperfield - all day. I must live. I do no harm. If there are
people so unreflecting or so cruel, as to make a jest of me,
what is left for me to do but to make a jest of myself, them,
and everything? If I do so, for the time, whose fault is that?
Mine?’
No. Not Miss Mowcher’s, I perceived.
‘If I had shown myself a sensitive dwarf to your false
friend,’ pursued the little woman, shaking her head at
me, with reproachful earnestness, ‘how much of his help
or good will do you think I should ever have had? If little
Mowcher (who had no hand, young gentleman, in the mak-
ing of herself) addressed herself to him, or the like of him,
because of her misfortunes, when do you suppose her small
voice would have been heard? Little Mowcher would have as
much need to live, if she was the bitterest and dullest of pig-