g to stand that, you're a greater fool than I took you for.
What the hell do you mean by telling everybody about my private affairs?"

"My dear Tyson, a man who rides to hounds regularly on a kangaroo has no
private affairs, he is, _ipso facto_, a public character." He threw back
his head and shouted his laughter. "You've built yourself an everlasting
name."

"Oh, no doubt. If Morley knows it everybody knows it. You might just as
well confide in the town-crier." He sat down and pressed his hands to his
forehead.

"This," he said bitterly, "accounts for everything."

Stanistreet stared at him in hopeless bewilderment. "What _is_ the matter
with you?"

"Nothing. I'm not going to kick you out of the house. I only ask you, so
long as you are in it, to mind your own business."

"I can't. I haven't any business." No one could be more exasperating than
the guileless Louis. Tyson darted another glance at him that was quite
fiendish in its ferocity, and flung himself on the sofa. Sprawling there
with his hands in his pockets, he remarked with freezing politeness, "I
don't say much, Stanistreet, but I think a damned deal."

"My dear Orlando Furioso, surely a harmless jest--"

"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 Mo