“But I don’t need any one to look after me, thank heaven! I’m free!”
The old Major stopped at the door.
“And you feel that you can manage it all right? That you can——”
For reasons entirely his own he did not finish the sentence.
“I am managing it,” the girl quietly asserted.
And Uncle Chandler, in finally taking his departure, experienced at least a qualified relief. The girl was wrong, all wrong. And what was worse, she was much too lovely to the eye to remain unmolested by predaceous man. But she had a will of her own, had Teddie. And, what was more, she might have gone to Paris to “express herself,” as she called it. Or she might have tried to find her soul by going on the stage. And the Major knew well enough what that would have meant. After all, the girl would learn to scratch for herself. She would have to. And as old Stillman had intimated, it might do her a world of good!
CHAPTER FOUR
Teddie, as a matter-of-fact girl, had scant patience with the undue attribution of the romantic to the commonplace. Yet the manner in which she had first met Raoul Uhlan, it must be admitted, was not without its touch of the picturesque.
Teddie, still a little intoxicated with her new-found liberty, and further elated by the sparkling morning sunshine of Fifth Avenue, was swinging smartly up that slope which an over-busy world no longer remembers as Murray Hill. She was in a slightly shortened blue serge skirt that whipped against her slim young knees suggestively akin to the drapery of the Nike of Samothrace, and was just approaching the uplands of the Public Library Square when she caught sight of a violet-peddler.
A glimpse of the seven earthy-smelling clumps of bloom, buskined in tin-foil and neatly arranged on their little wooden tray, promptly intrigued the girl into stopping, fumbling in her none too orderly hand-bag, and passing over to the sloe-eyed Greek a bank-note with double-X’s imprinted on its silk-threaded surface. And having adjusted the sword-knotted clump to her belt by means of one of the peddler’s glass-headed pins, she looked up to see this same peddler contemplating the bank-note with a frown of perplexity. He was explaining, in broken English, that his exchequer stood much too limited to make change for a hill so big. Then, with a smile of inspiration, he placed the tray of violets in the girl’s hands, pointed toward a near-by store on the side-street, and plainly implied that he would break the twenty and return with more negotiable currency.