Page 822 - david-copperfield

‘Very well!’ said Mr. Spenlow.
A silence succeeding, I was undecided whether to go or
stay. At length I was moving quietly towards the door, with
the intention of saying that perhaps I should consult his
feelings best by withdrawing: when he said, with his hands
in his coat pockets, into which it was as much as he could
do to get them; and with what I should call, upon the whole,
a decidedly pious air:
‘You are probably aware, Mr. Copperfield, that I am not
altogether destitute of worldly possessions, and that my
daughter is my nearest and dearest relative?’
I hurriedly made him a reply to the effect, that I hoped
the error into which I had been betrayed by the desperate
nature of my love, did not induce him to think me merce-
nary too?
‘I don’t allude to the matter in that light,’ said Mr. Spen-
low. ‘It would be better for yourself, and all of us, if you
WERE mercenary, Mr. Copperfield - I mean, if you were
more discreet and less influenced by all this youthful non-
sense. No. I merely say, with quite another view, you are
probably aware I have some property to bequeath to my
child?’
I certainly supposed so.
‘And you can hardly think,’ said Mr. Spenlow, ‘having ex-
perience of what we see, in the Commons here, every day,
of the various unaccountable and negligent proceedings of
men, in respect of their testamentary arrangements - of all
subjects, the one on which perhaps the strangest revelations
of human inconsistency are to be met with - but that mine

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