"Stuff and nonsense! I'm your grandmother!" cried Lady Beauleigh
angrily.
"Ah, then your name is Vane," said Tinker sweetly.
"Vane! Vane!" Lady Beauleigh gasped rather than spoke the hated name.
"It's nothing of the kind! It's Beauleigh! I'm Lady Beauleigh!"
"I'm afraid there must be some mistake. You can't be my grandmother on
my father's side. My father's mother is dead," said Tinker in a tone
which almost seemed to apologise for her error.
"You must be very stupid, or very ignorant!" cried Lady Beauleigh.
"I'm your grandfather's second wife, as you ought to know!"
"Oh, I know, now," said Tinker; and his face shone with his sudden
enlightenment. "You keep a bank."
"I--keep--a--bank?" said Lady Beauleigh in a dreadful voice.
"Oh, not a roulette bank or baccarat bank," said Tinker with
well-affected hastiness. "One of the shop kind--where they sell
money--with glass doors."
"My father was a banker, if that's what you mean," said Lady Beauleigh.
"But a bank isn't a shop."
"Oh, I always think it a kind of shop," said Tinker with the
dispassionate air of a professor discussing a problem in the Higher
Mathematics. "It's as well to lump all these--these commercial things
together, isn't it?" And he was very pleased with the word commercial.
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