Teddie, once she was alone in her studio, experienced a sense of confinement, a feeling of compression, which had hitherto been absent from her newer mode of life. She felt the need for untrammelled movement through fresh air, the craving to get out into open spaces and leave the suffocation of city walls behind her. She promptly decided, in fact, to drive her car out to Tuxedo, and even went to the telephone to order it from the garage. Then she remembered that she no longer had a car. But this, in the face of the denudations with which life had been confronting her, did not impress her as a very vast deprivation. She merely called for another number and ordered a taxi, contenting herself with the thought of three gasoline-flavored hours in that _rus in urbe_ known as Central Park. But Teddie did not go gloom-riding in Central Park. For when she opened the door to what she thought to be a taxi-driver she found Gerry West there with his hat in his hand and a look of triumph in his eyes. “Well, I’ve got it back,” he announced, only momentarily abashed by the iciness of her manner. “Got what back?” asked Teddie, without so much as asking him to step inside. “Your car,” explained Gerry, entering the abode of art on his own hook. “It’s down at the door. And I had ’em put on a new pair of lamps on the way over.” “I’m sure that was very kind of you,” Teddie coldly admitted. But her attitude was something more than unbending. It was distinctly hostile. For there were certain things which she wasn’t quite able to forget. “Say, Teddie,” demanded her quick-eyed visitor, entirely ignoring her expression in his comprehensive stare about the studio, “what in the name of heaven are you doing in a dump like this?” “It seems to have proved an entirely satisfactory place to me,” Teddie responded with the utmost dignity. “But has it?” demanded Gerry, putting down his hat. “It would, if I were left alone,” said Teddie, biting her lips. “And what would that mean? What would that bring you?” asked Gerry, with a suddenly sobered face. “It would bring me the freedom I want,” retorted Teddie, with a challenge still in her gaze. “That is the one thing it could never do, O Helen of the Ruinous Face!” corrected Gerry. But Teddie, who was in no sense a classical student, saw nothing remarkably appropriate in this allusion to the ancients. “What makes you think that?” she asked, with a tremor in her voice. She hadn’t intended any retreat from her earlier severity of tone. She prided herself on not being the sort of girl who would willingly show the white feather. But Gerry had touched on something which had been bewildering her, of late, more than she was ready to acknowledge. “The things that have been happening around here,” he had the brutality to retort, “the things I’m now trying to straighten out for you!”