“But you’re only croaking out of a swamp of prejudices,” contended Teddie. “You don’t understand our ways of living or looking at life. You try to gauge Greenwich Village, which was once good enough for Poe and Masefield, by Fifth Avenue standards, and you get your numbers mixed.” She looked up at him with a more commiserative light in her earnest young eyes. “But if you want to see us as we are, why not take chow with me at the Blue Pigeon to-night?”
“Not muchee!” averred Uncle Chandler, with great alacrity. “I’ve altogether too much respect for my Fifth-Avenuey Little Mary. I’ve seen ’em before, those futuristic smoke-boxes with a tinned sardine rolled up in a pimento-skin and Mimis from Waterbury and up-State Villons who muss their hair and get mixed up on the garlic and free-verse. So, much as I love you, Teddie, I’ll toddle along to my benighted old Nasturtium Club and deaden my soul on Green Turtle clear and Terrapin, Philadelphia style, and breast of Chicken Fincise with sweet potatoes Dixie, and new peas Saute, and an ice and coffee to end up with.”
Teddie tried to look indifferent. But it took a struggle. For her Uncle Chandler had rather disdainfully picked up an oblong of cardboard and sat inspecting it with a none too approving eye.
What he inspected was a crayon sketch of an extremely muscular right arm and shoulder, a right arm and shoulder which at least demanded some qualified respect. But his grizzled old eyebrows were closer together as he looked up at Teddie again.
“Did you say you drew from models?” he casually inquired.
“Of course,” acknowledged Teddie, pausing long enough to answer her telephone and explain that she and not the landlord had ordered the new glass for the skylight.
“You don’t mean to say you have men come up here and—and expose their muscles for this sort of thing?” demanded Uncle Chandler, with a gesture toward the ample biceps in crayon.
Teddie laughed.
“Oh, no, that wasn’t a professional model. That’s the arm of Gunboat Dorgan, the prize-fighter. I sketched that the other afternoon when he was up here with Ruby Reamer, one of my regular models. He’s Ruby’s steady, as she calls it. She’s very proud of him, and had him showing me some of his stunts. So I thought it would be a good chance to get a study of an arm like that. And Gunnie—that’s what Ruby calls him—isn’t a bit like what I thought a prize-fighter would be. He’s rather a bright-minded boy, and a little shy, and if he wins the lightweight bout from Slim Britton, the English boxer, he’s going to marry Ruby and take a flat down on Second Avenue.”
“But you say he’s a fighter, a ring-fighter?”