“The fact is,” he was in the habit of saying to Lydia Hayden, “I can’t possibly conceive how two every-day old oysters like you and Trummie ever came into possession of a high-stepper like Theodora”—though, mercifully, he never imparted this bit of information to Teddie herself. For Teddie was quite hard enough to live with, even as things were. She rather hated the town house on the Avenue, which she openly called a mausoleum and agreed with her absent father that the one redeeming feature about brownstone fronts was the fact that the brownstone itself could never survive more than a century. She was, as her mother sorrowfully and repeatedly acknowledged, without a sense of the past, for she mocked at that town house’s crystal chandeliers and its white marble mantels and the faded splendor of its antique gold-and-ivory furniture, which looked as though it had come out of the Ark and made you think of Queen Victoria with a backache. When the spreading tides of commerce crept to and even encircled their staid party-walls and a velour-draped art-emporium opened up beside them, Teddie protested that she wasn’t greatly taken with the idea of living next to a paint shop. For it was about this time that she first threatened to become a trained nurse or a Deaconess if she had to have balsam-salts in her bath and a maid to chaperon the faucet-flow and poke her feet into rabbit-skin bags. She still hungered for freedom, and complained to her Uncle Chandler about “having to punch a time-clock,” as she put it, and more than once had been found enlarging on the Edwardian nature of her environment. “Poor mother, you know, hasn’t a thought later than 1899,” this apostle of the New had quite pensively averred. “There were some very respectable thoughts in 1899, as I remember them,” her Uncle Chandler had promptly responded, vaguely aware of little black clouds on the sky-line. “Yes, that’s what’s the matter with them,” acknowledged Teddie. “They were too respectable. They were smug. And I despise smugness.” The wrinkled-eyed old dandy contemplated her with a ruminative and abstracted stare. “You’re right, Teddikins,” he finally agreed. “We all get smug as we get older. That’s what that chap—er—that chap called Wordsworth tried to tell us once. Life, my dear, is a waffle-iron that shuts down on us and squeezes us into nice little squares like all the other waffles in the world. It will come and take even the immortal You-ness out of you. It tames you, Teddie, and trims you down, and turns you out an altogether acceptable but an altogether commonplace member of society. It converts you from a gooey savage into a genteel and straight-edged type. So if you can’t quite jibe with the mater, don’t take it all too tragically. There’ll be a time when Little Teddie Number Two will feel exactly the same about you, and——” “You’ll never see me idiotic enough to get married,” interrupted Teddie.