She had intended to say that she wanted to live for Art. But she hesitated. For Art, at that particular juncture, seemed a very anemic and elusive thing to live for. She had no idea, in fact, just what she _did_ intend living for. She was less impatient of others than she might once have been. She even recognized kindliness under the intentions of that over-personal emissary from her older world, however heavy-handed he may have been in his executions of those intentions. And that, impinging on her desolated young spirit, intrigued her into a brief but depressing mood of self-pity. There was no trace of tears in her eyes, for Teddie was not habitually lachrymose. But before she found that mood conquered and killed she was unable to resist the temptation to let her bobbed head sink wearily into the crooked arm which rested on one end of the none-too-orderly cherrywood table. “Oh, I say, you know; this sort of thing won’t do!” ejaculated her obviously disturbed visitor. “It won’t do, my dear,” he repeated as he patted what was left of the bobbed hair with his fatherly old hand. Teddie, however, was without the spirit either to agree or disagree with that statement. And her unhappiness so melted the heart of the benignant old Commodore that he took her hand and stroked it as he talked to her. And so gratified was he to see even the ghost of a grim little smile about her lips that a paternally commiserative impulse prompted him to stoop down and kiss the magnolia-white cheek. So intent, indeed, had he been on his contemplation of this white cheek, faintly shot through with its shell-pink, that the door had opened and a third person had stepped into the studio without his being conscious of the fact. And it was the voice of this intruder, more than Teddie’s sudden recoil of startled wonder, that promptly brought the Commodore to attention. “So _he’s_ doin’ it too!” called out Gunboat Dorgan, with a quaver of incredulity in his Celtic young voice. Whereupon he threw down his hat and advanced slowly toward the table-end. “Say it quick,” he commanded. “D’ yuh want me to knock his block off?” “No, no,” cried Teddie, already on her feet. “There’s been too much of that already!” “But I saw the old bird tryin’ to kiss yuh!” proclaimed the indignant youth. “Who is this young jackanapes?” interrupted the older man, in no way intimidated by the interloper with the cauliflower ear. “Didn’t I see this old mutt pullin’ that muggin’-stuff?” persisted Gunboat, ignoring the stately old gentleman with the rose-bud in his lapel. But Teddie was herself by this time and she fixed her champion from the East Side with a cold and steely stare. “I want to talk to you!” she said, with great deliberation. And she made that announcement with such an unlooked-for note of masterfulness that, unimpressed as it left the newcomer, it rather bewildered the old Commodore.