Teddie tried to stop him as he turned away.
“Noth-thing doin’!” he proclaimed with his movie-hero side-movement of the hand. “I’m Irish, I am, and me Irish is up. Yuh’re goin’ to see this goob bitin’ on a mouth-gag or yuh’re goin’ to see crape swingin’ over his door-mat!”
“It’s no use,” Teddie still tried to tell him. “It’s too late. It will only make things much worse than they already are!”
But Gunboat Dorgan hadn’t been crowned with that soubriquet of belligerency without fit and proper reason.
“I’m wise to this lay-out now,” he announced from the doorway, “and I’m goin’ to have a hand in windin’ it up. It’s no use tryin’ to flag me off. And I ain’t sayin’ yuh’re a quitter, for yuh’re only a girl. But yuh don’t see me layin’ down in the shafts wit’ a thing like this under me nose. I’m goin’ through wit’ this, and nobody’s goin’ to stop me. And maybe this’ll square up a little for—for them lamps o’ yours I put on the blink!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Teddie, once she was alone in her studio, experienced a sense of confinement, a feeling of compression, which had hitherto been absent from her newer mode of life. She felt the need for untrammelled movement through fresh air, the craving to get out into open spaces and leave the suffocation of city walls behind her. She promptly decided, in fact, to drive her car out to Tuxedo, and even went to the telephone to order it from the garage. Then she remembered that she no longer had a car.
But this, in the face of the denudations with which life had been confronting her, did not impress her as a very vast deprivation. She merely called for another number and ordered a taxi, contenting herself with the thought of three gasoline-flavored hours in that rus in urbe known as Central Park.
But Teddie did not go gloom-riding in Central Park. For when she opened the door to what she thought to be a taxi-driver she found Gerry West there with his hat in his hand and a look of triumph in his eyes.
“Well, I’ve got it back,” he announced, only momentarily abashed by the iciness of her manner.