'My dear Steerforth, what is the matter?'
'I wish with all my soul I had been better guided!'he exclaimed. 'I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!'
There was a passionate dejection in his manner that quite amazed me. He was more unlike himself than I could have supposed possible.
'It would be better to be this poor Peggotty, or his lout of a nephew,' he said, getting up and leaning moodily against the chimney-piece, with his face towards the fire, 'than to be myself, twenty times richer and twenty times wiser, and be the torment to myself that I have been, in this Devil's bark of a boat,within the last half-hour!'