But Teddie wasn’t making a go of it, as she very well knew, and for one weak moment she was tempted to take this kindly-eyed and clean-hearted old gentleman into her confidence and exteriorate her troubles by freely and frankly talking them over with one of her own kind. But a revival of her old spirit of independence nipped this impulse in the bud, so she merely gave the Commodore another cup of tea and somewhat pensively asked if the autumn ball at Tuxedo had been a success this year. Whereupon the old Commodore admitted that it had been a success, if you could call such things a success. But they weren’t like the good old days of the Patriarchs and the Assemblies and The Howling Swells. The spirit of the times had changed, had lamentably changed, and the relationship of the sexes in the younger generation seemed disturbing to the survivors of the older era when a lady was accepted as a lady and treated as one. And from this diatribe on the degeneration of the present day Teddie’s counsellor glided easily and eloquently into the advantages, for the girl of to-day, of early marriage and adequate guardianship. Every girl of spirit ought to marry. Even Teddie herself, he finally ventured, ought to marry.
“No young whippersnapper, mind you,” discreetly qualified the old Commodore, “but some older and steadier man who knows the world and its ways, a man to be relied on in times of trouble, a man who’d be a harbor of refuge when the seas got to kicking up a bit!”
But this didn’t seem to impress Teddie as he had hoped it would.
“I’ve seen all I want to of men,” she announced with unexpected passion. “I despise ’em, the whole pack of them!”
“And you don’t intend to marry?” demanded the scion of the statelier years.
“Never!” retorted Teddie, staring fixedly at her unfinished sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight.
“Then what, may I ask, do you intend doing?” inquired her stiff-shouldered old visitor.
She had intended to say that she wanted to live for Art. But she hesitated. For Art, at that particular juncture, seemed a very anemic and elusive thing to live for. She had no idea, in fact, just what she did intend living for. She was less impatient of others than she might once have been. She even recognized kindliness under the intentions of that over-personal emissary from her older world, however heavy-handed he may have been in his executions of those intentions. And that, impinging on her desolated young spirit, intrigued her into a brief but depressing mood of self-pity. There was no trace of tears in her eyes, for Teddie was not habitually lachrymose. But before she found that mood conquered and killed she was unable to resist the temptation to let her bobbed head sink wearily into the crooked arm which rested on one end of the none-too-orderly cherrywood table.
“Oh, I say, you know; this sort of thing won’t do!” ejaculated her obviously disturbed visitor. “It won’t do, my dear,” he repeated as he patted what was left of the bobbed hair with his fatherly old hand.
Teddie, however, was without the spirit either to agree or disagree with that statement. And her unhappiness so melted the heart of the benignant old Commodore that he took her hand and stroked it as he talked to her. And so gratified was he to see even the ghost of a grim little smile about her lips that a paternally commiserative impulse prompted him to stoop down and kiss the magnolia-white cheek.