His friendship with the Bakewell family deepened. Lucy taught Audubon English, he taught her drawing, and their friendship very naturally ripened into love, which seems to have run its course smoothly. Audubon was happy. He had ample means, and his time was filled with congenial pursuits. He writes in his journal: "I had no vices, but was thoughtless, pensive, loving, fond of shooting, fishing, and riding, and had a passion for raising all sorts of fowls, which sources of interest and amusement fully occupied my time. It was one of my fancies to be ridiculously fond of dress; to hunt in black satin breeches, wear pumps when shooting, and to dress in the finest ruffled shirts I could obtain from France." The evidences of vanity regarding his looks and apparel, sometimes found in his journal, are probably traceable to his foster-mother's unwise treatment of him in his youth. We have seen how his father's intervention in the nick of time exercised a salutary influence upon him at this point in his career, directing his attention to the more solid attainments. Whatever traces of this self-consciousness and apparent vanity remained in after life, seem to have been more the result of a naïve character delighting in picturesqueness in himself as well as in Nature, than they were of real vanity. In later years he was assuredly nothing of the dandy; he himself ridicules his youthful fondness for dress, while those who visited him during his last years speak of him as particularly lacking in self-consciousness. Although he affected the dress of the dandies of his time, he was temperate and abstemious. "I ate no butcher's meat, lived chiefly on fruits, vegetables, and fish, and never drank a glass of spirits or wine until my wedding day." "All this time I was fair and rosy, strong and active as one of my age and sex could be, and as active and agile as a buck." That he was energetic and handy and by no means the mere dandy that his extravagance in dress might seem to indicate, is evidenced from the fact that about this time he made a journey on foot to New York and accomplished the ninety miles in three days in mid-winter. But he was angry, and anger is better than wine to walk on.