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. “This is a new life,” Teddie gravely continued, “and I’ve got to get in step with it or get walked over. There are people down here who have the gift of making poverty romantic, people who can turn an empty pocketbook into a sort of adventure. They can eat onion soup and _spaghetti au gratin_ and wash cold-storage capon down with that _eau-de-quinine_ stuff they drink and be happy on it because they know they are free, free to express themselves as they want to express themselves, free to work and live and think, and come and go as they like. And that’s wonderful, Uncle Chandler, when you come to think of it.” Uncle Chandler sat thinking this over, with no ponderable amount of enthusiasm on his face. “And just how do you intend expressing yourself?” he asked as the samovar began to bubble. “I think it will be in color,” said Teddie with the utmost solemnity. “I began with modeling, but it was rather messy, and I didn’t make much headway. I’m beginning to feel that pastel or dry-point is more my _penchant_. Raoul Uhlan is giving me three lessons a week.” “That big stiff!” ejaculated the philistine old Major. “He’s one of the cleverest painters in New York,” Teddie calmly explained. “And a professional tame-robin who gets portrait commissions, I understand, because he can dance like a stage acrobat!”