"So you think it funny, do you, to tell these people that my father was a tailor? It wouldn't be funny if it was false; but as it happens to be true, it's simply stupid."
"I never said your father was a tailor."
"Don't trouble yourself to lie about it. He was a tailor. The minuteness of his business only added to the enormity of his crime. He was born in an attic on a pile of old breeches. He was a damned dissenter—called himself a Particular Baptist. He kept a stinking slopshop in Bishopsgate Street, and a still more stinking schism-shop in Shoreditch."
("Why the devil shouldn't he?" murmured Louis.)
"Salvation free, gratis, for nothing, and five per cent, discount for ready money."
Louis was amused, but profoundly uncomfortable. This particular detail of Tyson's biography was not one of the things he knew; if it had been, he would naturally have avoided the most distant allusion to it. As it happened, in his ignorance he seemed to have been perpetually blundering up against the circumstance. He went on clumsily enough—"If it was, I didn't know it, and if I had known it, it wouldn't have interested me in the least. You interest me; you are, and always will be, unique."
"You're an awful fool, Stanistreet. By your own admission Morley is acquainted with this charming romance."
"What if he is?"
"The inference is obvious. You told him."
"Good God! If I did, do you suppose that Morley or any one else would care? Does anybody care what another fellow's father was? As a matter of fact I neither knew nor cared. But for your own genius for autobiography I should never have heard of it."