Nor was the spirit of the home circle very greatly brightened when Teddie attended her first holiday party in the white and gold ballroom of the St. Regis, where she danced very badly with very dignified young partners in Eton jackets. There she not only stumbled on to the bewildering consciousness that there was something vaguely but ineradicably different in boys and girls, but publicly punched one of the older youths in the eye for holding her in a manner which she regarded as objectionable. And later in the same evening, when the still older brother of the thumped one sought to make family amends by the seeming honesty of his apologies, and Teddie relentingly agreed to let bygones be bygones, and they shook hands over it, man to man, as it were, and while Teddie stood studying a hawthorn rose-jar on one of the tulip-wood consoles, that same persistent youth, seeking to translate a moment of impersonal softening into a movement of personal appropriation, cheerfully and clumsily tried to kiss her. Whereupon, let it be duly noted, Theodora Lydia first enunciated her significant, her perplexed, and her slightly exasperated query: “Are all boys like that?” Yet by the time the governess-cart had been stowed away and Teddie had learned there was little use being a millionaire’s daughter, after all, since the third pound of Maillards never did taste as sweet as the first, her butternut-brown showed a tendency to fade into magnolia-pink with a background of gardenia-white, and certain earlier boy-like straightnesses of line took unto themselves mysterious contours, and the runway of freckles that spanned the bridge of her adorable little nose faded like a Milky Way in the morning sky. And that meant still another era, the era of solemnly visited shops in the City, and muffled and many-mirrored _salons_ where she was pinned up and snipped at and pressed down, and sleepy afternoon concerts that smelled of violets and warm furs and over-breathed air, and a carefully selected matinée or two, and even revived lessons in dancing, which, oddly enough, the resilient-spirited Teddie never greatly took to. And then came equally sedate and carefully timed migrations to Lakewood and Aiken and Florida, though Teddie openly acknowledged her dislike to traveling with a retinue and seventeen pieces of baggage, to say nothing of the genealogical books and the case of certified milk.