I soon found out that Mrs. Gummidge did not always make herself so agreeable as she might have been expected to do, under the circumstances of her residence with Mr. Peggotty. Mrs. Gummidge’s was rather a fretful disposition, and she whimpered more sometimes than was comfortable for other parties in so small an establishment. I was very sorry for her; but there were moments when it would have been more agreeable, I thought, if Mrs. Gummidge had had a convenient apartment of her own to retire to, and had stopped there until her spirits revived.
Mr. Peggotty went occasionally to a public house called The Willing Mind. I discovered this, by his being out on the second or third evening of our visit, and by Mrs. Gummidge’s looking up at the dutch clock, between eight and nine, and saying he was there, and that, what was more, she had known in the morning he would go there.
Mrs. Gummidge had been in a low state all day, and had burst into tears in the forenoon, when the fire smoked. “I am a lone lorn creetur’,” were Mrs. Gummidge’s words, when that unpleasant occurrence took place, “and everythink goes contrairy with me.”
“Oh, it’ll soon leave off,” said Peggotty—I again mean our Peggotty—“and besides, you know, it’s not more disagreeable to you than to us.”
“I feel it more,” said Mrs. Gummidge.
It was a very cold day, with cutting blasts of wind. Mrs. Gummidge’s peculiar corner of the fireside seemed to me to be the warmest and snuggest in the place, as her chair was certainly the easiest, but it didn’t suit her that day at all. She was constantly complaining of the cold, and
of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called “the creeps.” At last she shed tears on that subject, and said again that she was “a lone lorn creetur’ and everythink went contrairy with her.”
“It is certainly very cold,” said Peggotty. “Everybody must feel it so.”
“I feel it more than other people,” said Mrs. Gummidge.
So at dinner; when Mrs. Gummidge was always helped immediately after me, to whom the preference was given as a visitor of distinction. The fish were small and bony, and the potatoes were a little burnt. We all acknowledged that we felt this something of a disappointment; but Mrs. Gummidge said she felt it more than we did, and shed tears again, and made that former declaration with great bitterness.