"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.
"No: it isn't! A bank isn't a shop, you stupid little boy!" cried Lady Beauleigh hotly.
"Well, just as you like," said Tinker with graceful surrender. "I only call it a shop because it's convenient."