He was so impressed, in fact, by the shadows of fatigue about Teddie’s starry eyes and the world-weariness in her forlorn little smile that he concluded the gravest fears of his old friend the Major to be quite well founded. But Teddie, accepting him as an emissary from a world of pomp and order which seemed eternally lost to her, was glad enough to ensconce him in the brown velvet armchair and make tea for him in the battered old samovar. It was not particularly good tea, he soon discovered, but that in no way dampened his ardor or discouraged him in the object of his visitation. So he hummed and hawed, and touched lightly on the prerogatives of the elderly, and ventured the assertion that New York was an extremely bewildering city, especially for the young, and he became paternal and platitudinous over the perils of the wide, wide world in general, and then with rather awkward unconcern announced his hope that Teddie was making a go of it. But Teddie wasn’t making a go of it, as she very well knew, and for one weak moment she was tempted to take this kindly-eyed and clean-hearted old gentleman into her confidence and exteriorate her troubles by freely and frankly talking them over with one of her own kind. But a revival of her old spirit of independence nipped this impulse in the bud, so she merely gave the Commodore another cup of tea and somewhat pensively asked if the autumn ball at Tuxedo had been a success this year. Whereupon the old Commodore admitted that it had been a success, if you could call such things a success. But they weren’t like the good old days of the Patriarchs and the Assemblies and The Howling Swells. The spirit of the times had changed, had lamentably changed, and the relationship of the sexes in the younger generation seemed disturbing to the survivors of the older era when a lady was accepted as a lady and treated as one. And from this diatribe on the degeneration of the present day Teddie’s counsellor glided easily and eloquently into the advantages, for the girl of to-day, of early marriage and adequate guardianship. Every girl of spirit ought to marry. Even Teddie herself, he finally ventured, ought to marry. “No young whippersnapper, mind you,” discreetly qualified the old Commodore, “but some older and steadier man who knows the world and its ways, a man to be relied on in times of trouble, a man who’d be a harbor of refuge when the seas got to kicking up a bit!” But this didn’t seem to impress Teddie as he had hoped it would. “I’ve seen all I want to of men,” she announced with unexpected passion. “I despise ’em, the whole pack of them!” “And you don’t intend to marry?” demanded the scion of the statelier years. “Never!” retorted Teddie, staring fixedly at her unfinished sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight. “Then what, may I ask, do you intend doing?” inquired her stiff-shouldered old visitor.