David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Chapter 50 Page 21

‘Say anything of me; but don’t visit my disgrace and shame, more than I have done, on folks who are as honourable as you!

Have some respect for them, as you are a lady, if you have no mercy for me.’

‘I speak,’ she said, not deigning to take any heed of this appeal, and drawing away her dress from the contamination of Emily’s touch, ‘I speak of HIS home — where I live. Here,’ she said, stretching out her hand with her contemptuous laugh, and looking down upon the prostrate girl, ‘is a worthy cause of division between lady-mother and gentleman-son; of grief in a house where she wouldn’t have been admitted as a kitchen-girl; of anger, and repining, and reproach.

This piece of pollution, picked up from the water-side,