“This is a new life,” Teddie gravely continued, “and I’ve got to get in step with it or get walked over. There are people down here who have the gift of making poverty romantic, people who can turn an empty pocketbook into a sort of adventure. They can eat onion soup and spaghetti au gratin and wash cold-storage capon down with that eau-de-quinine stuff they drink and be happy on it because they know they are free, free to express themselves as they want to express themselves, free to work and live and think, and come and go as they like. And that’s wonderful, Uncle Chandler, when you come to think of it.”
Uncle Chandler sat thinking this over, with no ponderable amount of enthusiasm on his face.
“And just how do you intend expressing yourself?” he asked as the samovar began to bubble.
“I think it will be in color,” said Teddie with the utmost solemnity. “I began with modeling, but it was rather messy, and I didn’t make much headway. I’m beginning to feel that pastel or dry-point is more my penchant. Raoul Uhlan is giving me three lessons a week.”
“That big stiff!” ejaculated the philistine old Major.
“He’s one of the cleverest painters in New York,” Teddie calmly explained.
“And a professional tame-robin who gets portrait commissions, I understand, because he can dance like a stage acrobat!”
“I know nothing about his dancing,” remarked Teddie, with her eyebrows up. “But I do know it’s sinful the way the children of our idle rich are kept cooped up and shut away from real life. They’re hemmed in with a lot of silly old taboos. They’re laced up in a straight-jacket of social laws until they’re too flabby to face a personal dilemma that an East Side shop-girl could decide before she’d finished powdering her nose.”
Uncle Chandler took up his teacup and then put it down again.
“I rather fail to see what the personal predicaments of shop-girls have got to do with the matter,” he said with some acerbity. “You’re a Hayden, the third wealthiest woman in Orange County, and a girl who’s had every comfort that money and machinery can give her. Yet you leave a home that cost about two-thirds of a million—without counting those cross-eyed marble lions your mother brought over from Florence for the Sunken Gardens!—and come down here into this moth-eaten backyard of the Eighth Ward and live on macaroni and red ink and dream that raw life is being dished up to you on the half-shell. You talk about liberty and expressing yourself, and all you’re doing is slumming, just slumming!”