Twin Tales: Are All Men Alike, and, The Lost TitianStringer, Arthur
General
Twin Tales: Are All Men Alike, and, The Lost Titian
Stringer, Arthur
Canadian fiction
And this brought about the divorce in the Hayden family, the old Major
sturdily maintained, not an out-and-out Supreme Court one, but an astral
one, with a twelve-inch telescope as a co-respondent. However that might
have been, it left Trumbull Hayden a very faint and ghostly figure to
his daughter Theodora Lydia Lorillard, who had her own natural and
inherited love for solitude, but could never be alone, just as she could
never be free. For always, when she moved about, she did so with a maid
or a governess or a groom at her heels. And to add to her misery and her
despair of final emancipation, the régime of the governess and the tutor
and the dancing-master crept stealthily upon her. It was her second
tutor, an Oxford importation with a hot-potato accent and a pale but
penetrating eye, whom Teddie adroitly tied up in one of the big library
_fauteuils_ and refused to liberate until he had duly recounted the
entire story of The Pit and the Pendulum, with The Fall of the House of
Usher put in for good measure. And two days later, during tea on the
terrace, she put smelling-salts in his cup, the same being not only
punishment for an unfavorable conduct-report, but a timely intimation
that tittle-tattlers would have short shrift with her.
Then came other tutors and teachers and governesses, each determined in
character and each departing in time with a secret consolation check
from Uncle Chandler and the conviction that Miss Theodora was anything
but the gift of God. And then came boarding-school, boarding-school from
which so much was surreptitiously expected. But from this first
boarding-school, which had castellated eaves and overlooked the Hudson,
Teddie was brought back by her Uncle Chandler in disgrace and a
peacock-blue landaulet. A year later the attempt was renewed, it is
true, this time in a Quaker establishment with a Welsh name and an
imitation Norman arch over its main entrance. But this school, besides
being ultra-fashionable in name was also ultra-frugal in all matters of
_menu_, and Teddie proved so successful in playing cutthroat poker for
“desserts” that seventeen extraneous sweets in one week did not and
could not escape the attention of the quiet-eyed maiden-ladies in
attendance. So this, added to the gumming up of one of the grand-pianos
in the practise-room with five pounds of prohibited chocolate-creams,
led to an interview with the lady-principal herself. And even that
interview might not have been a valedictory one had Teddie not been
detected perusing a copy of Daudet’s _Jack_ during an ancient-history
“period,” a Daudet’s _Jack_ from which was unearthed an excellent
caricature of the lady-principal herself. So Teddie awoke still again to
the discovery that her dream of personal freedom was merely an _ignis
fatuus_, and she journeyed homeward, a melancholy loss to the
basket-ball team and an even more melancholy accession to the paternal
acres at Tuxedo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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