But there were quite a number of inexplicable wrinkles in Teddie’s mental make-up. Although to the manner born, she entertained a fixed indifference toward animals and a disturbingly _bourgeois_ admiration for machinery. Horses bit at you as you passed them, and dogs were rather smelly, and Guernsey cows put their heads down and tried to horn you if you went near them in scarlet sports-clothes. But a machine was a machine, and did only and always what it was ordained to do. If you took the trouble to understand it and treat it right, it remained your meek and faithful servant. Restoring the viscera of disemboweled traveling-clocks, in fact, gave Teddie many repeated lessons in patience, and one of her pleasantest rainy-day occupations was to dissect and then reassemble one of her father’s larger and more expensive lucernal microscopes. And this tends to explain why Teddie, even before her toes could quite reach the pedals, was able to run the Haydens’ big royal-blue limousine. On one glorious occasion, indeed, and quite unknown to her deluded family, she _chauffed_ in secret all the morning of Election Day, _chauffed_ for the Democratic party, with strange banners encircling that dignified vehicle and even stranger figures reposing therein, to say nothing of a tin box of champagne-wafers and a brocaded carton of candied fruit on the driving-seat beside her. But her Uncle Chandler, who was a staunch Republican, beheld that alliance with the treacherous enemy and rescued the royal-blue limousine from ignominy while Teddie was regaling herself on three ice-cream sodas in a corner drug store. Being less expert at such things than he imagined, however, Uncle Chandler steered the big car into a box-pillar, and broke the lamps, and dolorously entered into a compact with his niece to the end that the doings of the day in question might remain a sealed book to the rest of the family. For Uncle Chandler resolutely maintained, when Teddie was not in hearing, that the girl was a brick and a bit of a wonder, and that he hoped to heaven life wouldn’t tame her down to a chow-chow in permanent-wave and petticoats.