“I grew, myself,” Mrs. Wilfer sternly proclaimed, “after I was married.”
“Very well, Ma,” returned Lavvy, “then I think you had much better have left it alone.”
The lofty glare with which the majestic woman received this answer, might have embarrassed a less pert opponent, but it had no effect upon Lavinia: who, leaving her parent to the enjoyment of any amount of glaring at she might deem desirable under the circumstances, accosted her sister, undismayed.
“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 Boffin, as if it represented her chief objection to the owners of that name, and as if she could have born Doffin, Moffin, or Poffin much better.)
“Ma,” said Bella, angrily, “you force me to say that I am truly sorry I did come home, and that I never will come home again, except when poor dear Pa is here. For, Pa is too magnanimous to feel envy and spite towards my generous friends, and Pa is delicate enough and gentle enough to remember the sort of little claim they thought I had upon them and the unusually trying position in which, through no act of my own, I had been placed. And I always did love poor dear Pa better than all the rest of you put together, and I always do and I always shall!”
Here Bella, deriving no comfort from her charming bonnet and her elegant dress, burst into tears.
“I think, R. W.,” cried Mrs. Wilfer, lifting up her eyes and apostrophising the air, “that if you were present, it would be a trial to your feelings to hear your wife and the mother of your family depreciated in your name. But Fate has spared you this, R. W., whatever it may have thought proper to inflict upon her!”
Here Mrs. Wilfer burst into tears.
“I hate the Boffins!” protested Miss Lavinia. “I don’t care who objects to their being called the Boffins. I will call ’em the Boffins. The Boffins, the Boffins, the Boffins! And I say they are mischief-making Boffins, and I say the Boffins have set Bella against me, and I tell the Boffins to their faces:” which was not strictly the fact, but the young lady was excited: “that they are detestable Boffins, disreputable Boffins, odious Boffins, beastly Boffins. There!”
Here Miss Lavinia burst into tears.
The front garden-gate clanked,
