“I suppose you won’t consider yourself quite disgraced, Bella, if I give you a kiss? Well! And how do you do, Bella? And how are your Boffins?” “Peace!” exclaimed Mrs Wilfer. “Hold! I will not suffer this tone of levity.”

“My goodness me! How are your Spoffins, then?” said Lavvy, “since Ma so very much objects to your Boffins.”

“Impertinent girl! Minx!” said Mrs Wilfer, with dread severity.

“I don’t care whether I am a Minx, or a Sphinx,” returned Lavinia, coolly, tossing her head; “it’s exactly the same thing to me, and I’d every bit as soon be one as the other; but I know this — I’ll not grow after I’m married!”

“You will not? you will not?” repeated Mrs Wilfer, solemnly.

“No, Ma, I will not. Nothing shall induce me.”

Mrs Wilfer, having waved her gloves, became loftily pathetic. “But it was to be expected;” thus she spake. “A child of mine deserts me for the proud and prosperous, and another child of mine despises me. It is quite fitting.”

“Ma,” Bella struck in, “Mr and Mrs Boffin are prosperous, no doubt; but you have no right to say they are proud. You must know very well that they are not.”

“In short, Ma,” said Lavvy, bouncing over to the enemy without a word of notice, “you must know very well — or if you don’t, more shame for you! — that Mr and Mrs Boffin are just absolute perfection.”

“Truly,” returned Mrs Wilfer, courteously receiving the deserter, “it would seem that we are required to think so. And this, Lavinia, is my reason for objecting to a tone of levity. Mrs Boffin (of whose physiognomy I can never speak with the composure I would desire to preserve), and your mother, are not on terms of intimacy. It is not for a moment to be supposed that she and her husband dare to presume to speak of this family as the Wilfers. I cannot therefore condescend to speak of them as the Boffins. No; for such a tone — call it familiarity, levity, equality, or what you will — would imply those social interchanges which do not exist. Do I render myself intelligible?”

Without taking the least notice of this inquiry, albeit delivered in an imposing and forensic manner, Lavinia reminded her sister, “After all, you know, Bella, you haven’t told us how your Whatshisnames are.”

“I don’t want to speak of them here,” replied Bella, suppressing indignation, and tapping her foot on the floor. “They are much too kind and too good to be drawn into these discussions.”

“Why put it so?” demanded Mrs Wilfer, with biting sarcasm. “Why adopt a circuitous form of speech? It is polite and it is obliging; but why do it? Why not openly say that they are much too kind and too good for us? We understand the allusion. Why disguise the phrase?”

“Ma,” said Bella, with one beat of her foot, “you are enough to drive a saint mad, and so is Lavvy.”

“Unfortunate Lavvy!” cried Mrs Wilfer, in a tone of commiseration. “She always comes for it. My poor child!” But Lavvy, with the suddenness of her former desertion, now bounced over to the other enemy: very sharply remarking, “Don’t patronize me, Ma, because I can take care of myself.”

“I only wonder,” resumed Mrs Wilfer, directing her observations to her elder daughter, as safer on the whole than her utterly unmanageable younger, “that you found time and inclination to tear yourself from Mr and Mrs Boffin, and come to see us at all. I only wonder that our claims, contending against the superior claims of Mr and Mrs Boffin, had any weight. I feel I ought to be thankful for gaining so much, in competition with Mr and Mrs Boffin.” (The good lady bitterly emphasized the first letter of the word