"A boy of your age ought not to think about convenience. You ought to have been taught to keep things clear and distinct," said Lady Beauleigh in a heavy, didactic voice.
"Oh, it's quite clear to me, really, that a bank's a shop; but we won't talk about it, if you're ashamed of it. After all, one doesn't talk about trade, does one?" said Tinker with a return to his kindly but exasperating patronage.
"Ashamed of it? I'm not ashamed of it!" said Lady Beauleigh in the roar of a wounded lioness.
"No, no; of course not! I only thought you were! I made a mistake!" said Tinker quickly, with an infuriating show of humouring her.
"I'm proud of it! Proud of it!" said Lady Beauleigh thickly. "And when you grow up and understand things, you'll wish your father had been a banker, too!"
"I don't think so," said Tinker; and he smiled at her very pleasantly. "I'm quite satisfied with my father as he is. I'd really rather that he was a gentleman."
"A banker is a gentleman!" cried Lady Beauleigh.
"Yes, yes, of course," said Tinker, humouring her again. "He's—he's a commercial gentleman."
Lady Beauleigh could find no words. Never in the course of her domineering life had she been raised to such an exaltation of whole-souled exasperation. She could only glare at the suave disposer of her long-cherished, long-asserted pretensions; and she glared with a fury which made Elsie, who had edged little by little to the extreme edge of the seat, rise softly and take up a safer position, standing three yards away.
Tinker took advantage of Lady Beauleigh's helpless speechlessness to say thoughtfully, "But about your being my grandmother? If you're not my father's mother or my mother's mother, you can't really be my grandmother. You must be my step-grandmother.