“Oh-h!” said Mrs. Wilfer, with a severely unconvinced look. “My daughter Bella is accessible and shall speak for herself.” Then opening the door a little way, simultaneously with a sound of scuttling outside it, the good lady made the proclamation, “Send Miss Bella to me!” which proclamation, though grandly formal, and one might almost say heraldic, to hear, was in fact enunciated with her maternal eyes reproachfully glaring on that young lady in the flesh⁠—and in so much of it that she was retiring with difficulty into the small closet under the stairs, apprehensive of the emergence of Mr. and Mrs. Boffin.