But these, she found, were even more limited than she had imagined. There seemed no one to whom she could turn in her emergency, no one to whom she could look for any restoration of dignity without involving some still greater loss of dignity. And that one word of “dignity,” for all her untoward impulses of insurrection, was a very large word in the lexicon of Teddie’s life. She had been mauled and humiliated. She had been unthinkably misjudged and cheapened. And it was as much the insult to her intelligence as the hammer-blow to her pride which made her ache with the half-pagan hunger of rebellious youth for adequate atonement.
It wasn’t until daylight came that any possible plan of procedure presented itself. Then, as she paced her studio in the more lucid white light of morning, with the sheathed blade of her indignation still clanking at her heels, her eye fell on the crayon sketch of Gunboat Dorgan’s well muscled right arm.
She stopped short, arrested by a thought as new as though it had bloomed out of the cherrywood table beside her. Then she sat down in the velvet-draped armchair, letting this somewhat disturbing thought slip from her head to her heart, as it were, where it paced its silent parliaments of instinct until she had breakfasted. In leaving it thus to instinct she felt that she was leaving it to a conference of ancestral ghosts to argue over and fight out to a finish. But when that decision was once made she accepted it without questioning. Her only hope, she suddenly felt, lay in Gunboat Dorgan. Her only chance of balancing life’s ledger of violence rested with that East Side youth with the fore-shortened Celtic nose and the cauliflower ear. It was Gunboat Dorgan who could do for her what the situation demanded.
Her only way of getting in touch with young Dorgan, she remembered, was through Ruby Reamer. But Ruby’s telephone number had been left with her in case of need, and with impulse still making her movements crisp she went to the telephone and called up her model.
“Ruby,” she said in the most matter-of-fact tone of which she was capable, “can you tell me where I can find your friend, Mr. Dorgan?”
There was a ponderable space of silence.
“And what do you want with me friend Mr. Dorgan?” asked the voice over the wire, not without a slight saber-edge of suspicion.
Teddie entrenched herself behind a timely but guarding trill of laughter.
“It’s for something I can’t very well tell you,” she said, “something that I’ll be able to explain to you later on.”
And again a silence that was obviously meditative intervened.