“How about some tea?” she said instead. And without waiting for his reply she lifted out a battered old samovar and pushed the cigarettes toward his end of the table as she proceeded, somewhat more deftly than her visitor had anticipated, with the business in hand.
“About those peaches and truffles, Uncle Chandler,” she said as she stooped to adjust the flickering blue flame. “I sent them back because I’m out of the flapper class now. It was kind of you, of course. But I’m no longer a schoolgirl. I’ve cut out that boarding-school stuff. I intend to be something more than a Strasbourg goose, and if I’m suffering from any sort of hunger, it’s more a hunger of the soul than of the body.”
This was a new note from Teddie, and not unlike most newnesses, it came with a slight sense of shock.
“My dear girl, I was only trying to get even with you for that—that delightful little water-color of the Palisades above Fort Lee. It was clever, my dear, and I always did like our Hudson River scenery.”
Teddie stood up straight. She stood inspecting him with a cold and slightly combative eye.
“That was the Flatiron Building in a snow-storm,” she somewhat frigidly explained.
“Ah!” said the astute old Major, settling into the brown velvet armchair. “That’s what I said, all along. That’s precisely what I told Higginson. And Higginson, who is always a bit bullheaded, y’ understand, insisted that it was Palisades, saying he’d lived on ’em all his life and ought to know. But I didn’t come here to talk about Higginson. I came here to find out how you’re getting along.”
This was a question which Teddie found necessary to sit back and consider carefully.
“You see, Uncle Chandler, I’ve so much to unlearn! You can’t keep a girl under glass most of her life and then expect her to horn in where the dairy-lunchers learned the game in their infancy.”
The Major winced a little. Here was still another newness to disturb him, a newness not so much of phraseology as of outlook.