But the fact that Gerry essayed little more than a stiff bow as he passed by did not greatly trouble Teddie, for about this time she fell secretly in love with an Episcopalian curate of delicate health and indescribably melancholy eyes, a young man with a face like a Shelley and an audible and asthmatic manner of breathing. And at the same time that he sobered Teddie down a great deal his health improved perceptibly under Teddie’s arduous campaign of forced feeding. She even extended those ventral activities to the despatching of marrons and _bar de luc_ to hospital wards, and spoke of giving up her life to prison reform, and argued on the beauties of the monastic life, and for a time considered taking the veil. But the Shelley with the melancholy eyes unfortunately developed a cough and for the sake of his health was transferred to a curacy in southern California. This deportation gave every promise of fanning the flame which it should have tempered, translating the exile into a figure ideally romantic—until Teddie learned that on his western migration he had inconsiderately married a certain ex-contralto of the First Presbyterian Church who had graduated into the Chautauqua Circuit.
Teddie thereupon threw herself into golf and spent whole days on the Tuxedo links, and the gardenia-white once more darkened down to the beechnut brown. She became as hard as nails, both in body and spirit, and did her best to forget to remember her asthmatic young curate’s pet story of the Bishop who said “Assouan” every time he fuzzled the turf, because Assouan, of course, was acknowledged to be the biggest “dam” in the world.
But the time came when Teddie was tired of golf, just as tired of making the rounds of her eighteen holes as she was of making the rounds of the circular ballroom of the Tuxedo Club with fox-trotting youngsters and sedately waltzing oldsters. She was tired of dinners at Table Rock, and tired of seeing the “No-One-Admitted-Without-Permit” signs, and tired of the Meadow Brook steeplechase, and tired of the stately and stupid dinners in town. She was tired of life and tired of even herself. But most of all she was tired of that complicated machinery of existence in which she found herself so inextricably enmeshed. She still dreamed of liberating herself from that ponderously engineered intricacy of protectional pulleys and powers. But even while she felt that she was encaged, encaged as a pulsing hair-spring is encaged in a watch-case of smothering gold, she scarcely knew which way to look for escape. She caught a momentary breath or two of freedom, it is true, by boldly introducing motor-polo within the “No-Admittance-Without-Permit” precincts, a brand of sublimated polo played with a football from a runabout with a stripped _chassis_. But the gardeners and the board of governors united in objecting to the havoc wrought to the Club turf, and Monty Tilford broke an arm in one of the collisions, so a ban was put on what might have proved a belated safety-valve for Teddie’s spiritual steam-chest.