“Yes, that’s how he makes his living. He’s quite serious about it all, and trains hard, and plans about working his way up, just as a man in any other profession would.” Uncle Chandler sat thinking this over. He would have done considerably more thinking if he’d been in possession of the information that his niece had already allowed this same prize-fighter to pilot her and Ruby and the wine-colored roadster out to a sea-food dinner at a Sound road-house. But even as it was, Uncle Chandler seemed sufficiently upset. “Say, Teddikins,” he somewhat grimly remarked out of the silence that had fallen over the darkening studio, “what d’you suppose your mother would think about all this?” “I’m not in the least interested in what mother thinks about it,” was Teddie’s altogether irresponsible and wilful rejoinder. The old Major, who had already risen to go, turned this speech over, turned it over with great deliberation. Then he sat down again. “It’s not so much Lydia, my dear,” he said. “It’s what poor old Lydia embodies, the organized entrenchments that surround young girls, the machinery of service that may shut you in, but at the same time does things for you and gives you something to fall back on when the pinch comes!” “But I don’t understand what you mean by the pinch,” Teddie told him, straightening the gardenia that stood so stiff and straight in his coat-lapel. For she liked her Uncle Chandler, and she liked him a lot. And she was a little disturbed by the look of anxiety that had come into his worldly-wise old face. He stared at her for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and took up his hat and stick. “You’re all right, Teddie,” he announced with decision as he solemnly kissed her on the cheek-bone. “But—but I wish somebody was looking after you when I’m down there being boiled out.” This made Teddie laugh. She not only laughed, but she extended her arms, like a traffic-officer stopping a jay-driver, or a young eagle trying its wings. “But I don’t need any one to look after me, thank heaven! _I’m free!_” The old Major stopped at the door. “And you feel that you can manage it all right? That you can——” For reasons entirely his own he did not finish the sentence. “I _am_ managing it,” the girl quietly asserted. And Uncle Chandler, in finally taking his departure, experienced at least a qualified relief. The girl was wrong, all wrong. And what was worse, she was much too lovely to the eye to remain unmolested by predaceous man. But she had a will of her own, had Teddie. And, what was more, she might have gone to Paris to “express herself,” as she called it. Or she might have tried to find her soul by going on the stage. And the Major knew well enough what that would have meant. After all, the girl would learn to scratch for herself. She would have to. And as old Stillman had intimated, it might do her a world of good! CHAPTER FOUR