“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 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.”

“That’s odd, considering that you’ve made capital out of it ever since I knew you.  It supplied the point of all your witticisms that weren’t failures.  I assure you your delicate humor was not lost on me.”

“Considering that I’ve known you for at least twenty years, those jokes must have worn a little—­er—­threadbare.  I’m extremely sorry for these—­these breaches of etiquette.  I shall do my best to repair them.  That’s a specimen of the thing you mean, I imagine?” From sheer nervousness Louis did what was generally the best thing to do after any little squabble with Tyson.  He laughed.