“Well, there’s lots of time to think about that. But in the meantime, my dear, don’t break the Fifth Commandment, even though you have to bend it a little. And on the way out I’m going to remind Lydia about that roadster I’ve been telling her you ought to have. It’s wonderful what a lot of steam you can let off in a roadster of your own!” Teddie, in time, came into possession of her roadster, a small wine-colored racer upholstered in dove-gray and neatly disguised as a shopping-car. And it seemed, during the first few weeks of its ownership, that the wings of personal freedom had finally been bestowed upon the recalcitrant Teddie, who went hillward in her roadster with claret and caviar sandwiches packed under its seat and went cityward with fat and disorderly little rolls of bank-notes tucked under its cushion-ends. She loved that car, for a fortnight at least, with a devotion that was wonderful to behold, and talked to it fraternally as her narrow-toed brogan spurred it into slipping past dust-trailing joy-riders on the back roads, and wept openly when it blew a tire and buckled a radius-rod in the ditch, patting its side sympathetically and saying soothing little words to it as though it were an animal. But time, alas, proved to Teddie that her _Château en Espagne_ was not to be reached on rubber tires. For a car, after all, is only a merry-go-round with an elastic orbit, a humdrum old merry-go-round that isn’t so merry as it seems, since it must always cover the same old roads and the same old rounds and remain hampered and held in by the same old urban and suburban regulations. Teddie, it is true, soon found herself on nodding terms with the Park “canaries” and the traffic cops, and was able to weed out the ones who’d give her the wink when she forgot about the one-way streets and the parking signs and the speed-laws in general. Yet three times in one season she shocked Tuxedo Park by appearing in court and being twice fined for road violations and once publicly lectured for imperiling the peace and safety of the commonwealth. So even with the machinery which she loved she began to see that she was still restricted and hampered and circumscribed and imprisoned. And the poor little rich girl who should have been quite happy, remained quite normally and satisfactorily and luxuriously miserable. CHAPTER TWO