Steerforth’s attempted reconciliation with Rosa Dartle turns a moment of apparent domestic ease into a sudden rupture. During David Copperfield’s visit to Steerforth’s home, Steerforth works to make Rosa a willing companion, and she gradually softens toward him. But when he puts his arm around her and proposes that they love one another, she strikes him and runs from the room. David’s later recollection gives the scene its sharper significance: the friendliness he witnessed was real, but it did not erase the anger and hurt beneath it.

Background and the changing mood

Rosa’s resistance is already audible in her reply to Mrs. Steerforth’s appeal for another supposition: she has raised the possibility that James and his mother might fail in their duty to one another, and Mrs. Steerforth answers that she trusts their sense of duty. Rosa responds with pointed irony, thanking her for demonstrating how reassuring that duty must be. The exchange puts strain beneath the family’s polite conversation before Steerforth begins his effort to charm Rosa.

David observes that Steerforth applies his skill with remarkable ease. Rosa, whom David has regarded as jaundiced and perverse, seems to struggle against his influence, at first angrily and then with diminishing resistance. Her expression changes; admiration grows in her look; at last, her sharp glance softens and her smile becomes gentle. David, who has felt afraid of her, relaxes too. The company sits around the fire talking and laughing with the unguarded ease of children. The warmth is not simply Steerforth’s performance: Rosa participates in it. Yet David’s retrospective account stresses how quickly an apparent change in feeling can be mistaken for a settled change in the relationship.

The harp and the sudden rupture

After Rosa leaves the dining room, Steerforth tells David that she is playing her harp, a rare event: he believes that only Mrs. Steerforth has heard her play during the preceding three years. The detail makes the music feel like a private disclosure, although Rosa has not offered an explanation for it. When David and Steerforth enter, Rosa asks what Steerforth cares for an Irish song. He urges her to sing one, invoking David’s love of music and asking to listen as he used to.

Rosa does not immediately play. Standing beside the harp, she moves her right hand as if playing while making no sound. Then she sits and draws the instrument toward her in one sudden motion. David remembers the song as uncanny and fearful in its intensity, as if it had risen from passion rather than having been composed. His attention is held by the contrast between the music’s low, imperfect expression and the feeling he senses within it. When the song ends, Rosa again moves her hand over the silent strings.

Steerforth breaks that suspended moment by leaving his seat and going to Rosa. He puts an arm around her, laughing, and says, "Come, Rosa, for the future we will love each other very much!" Rosa strikes him, throws him off with the fury David compares to a wild cat, and rushes out. The scene’s reversal is immediate: a tentative, shared intimacy becomes physical rejection. The gesture does not establish exactly what Rosa feels, but it makes plain that Steerforth’s playful declaration has crossed a boundary she will not accept.

Steerforth’s account and David’s parting

Mrs. Steerforth enters and asks what has happened. James calls Rosa an angel for a little while and says she has since run to the opposite extreme by way of compensation. His joking answer reduces her abrupt departure to an excess of temperament. His mother, by contrast, cautions him not to irritate Rosa: her temper has been soured and should not be tested. The difference matters. Steerforth treats the outburst as an eccentric turn; Mrs. Steerforth recognizes that his conduct can provoke it.

Rosa does not return, and the household makes no further mention of her until David goes with Steerforth to say good night. Steerforth then laughs at Rosa and asks whether David has ever seen such a fierce, incomprehensible person. David asks what she could have taken so suddenly amiss. Steerforth replies that it might have been anything, or nothing; he describes her as an edge-tool that needs careful handling and is always dangerous. His image acknowledges the risk of provoking her while turning that risk into a characteristic defect of hers. It leaves his own sudden embrace and declaration outside the account.

David’s farewell adds another quiet note to the episode. He says that he will be gone before Steerforth wakes, but Steerforth is unwilling to let him go and holds him by the shoulders. The affection between the two young men is presented as familiar and sincere; it also places David within the intimate circle from which Rosa has just fled. At this point, he can only register the contrast between Steerforth’s warmth toward him and his dismissive amusement at Rosa’s anger.

Retrospective significance

David explicitly marks the scene as one he would remember when the irreparable past later became plain. That retrospective framing changes the force of the earlier details. Steerforth’s ability to soften Rosa, the intimacy suggested by the rarely heard harp, her fierce rejection of his embrace, and his casual account of her afterward no longer read as an isolated domestic disturbance. They become evidence David had seen without understanding its full weight. The scene’s central irony is not that Rosa’s anger was invisible, but that David initially explained it through the same language of temperament and fascination that Steerforth supplies.

The episode also complicates the apparent reconciliation promised by its title. For a short while, Rosa joins the family’s laughter and sings at Steerforth’s request; the connection between them seems to have warmed. Yet her blow and flight show that a return to ease cannot be secured by charm alone. David records both the brief tenderness and its limit, preserving the moment in which conviviality gives way to a conflict that the people present cannot resolve. Its importance lies in that split view: the scene as it seemed to its young witness, and the scene as the older narrator, looking back, has learned to read.