Still later, however, when her mother was undergoing hydropathic revision in Virginia, she made one last and listless effort to escape by taking up flying. This she did _sub rosa_ and under an assumed name, and might have medicined her mysterious ailment with tail-spins and altitude-tests, but she suffered inordinately from nose-bleed and was unfortunately snapshotted for one of the Sunday papers the same week that she taxied into a signboard—which demanded appallingly expensive repairs to the machine and involved a cracked patella and a month or two with a crick in her knee, though it was a rather ridiculous three-hundred-word telegram from Virginia which really dissuaded the hangar authorities from continuing the services of their ruthlawing young novitiate.
And it was then that Teddie tipped over the apple-cart. It was then that she broke jail, and bolted, and took her life in her own hands.
She took her life in her own hands, as even humbler prisoners of circumstance had done before her, by allying herself with Art. She abjured the parental roof, leased a studio in the well-policed wilderness of Greenwich Village, and announced that she intended to express herself through the pure and impersonal medium of dry-point or modeling-clay. She wasn’t quite sure which it was to be, but that was a matter of secondary importance. She panted for freedom and she didn’t stop to worry over what particular hand was to bring about her liberation. She installed the wine-colored roadster in a down-town garage (to be taken out rarely and rather shamefacedly), and bought a Latin-Quarter paint-smock and bobbed her hair and learned how to make her own coffee and manipulate a kitchenette gas-range without smothering herself.
And her old Uncle Chandler, on becoming duly acquainted with this state of affairs, assented to everything but the bobbing of the hair, which he regarded as much too lovely hair to be snipped off anybody’s head. He even put the seal of his approval on her insurrection by sending down to her a hamper of potted truffles and brandied peaches.
Yet he stood aghast, the next day, when these were duly returned to him. That reversal of form, in fact, so disturbed him that he couldn’t get Teddie out of his mind, for a Teddie without an appetite was a Teddie who was no longer her old self. And the more he thought about it the more he realized that it was his plain and bounden duty to go down to Greenwich Village and investigate.