And this brought about the divorce in the Hayden family, the old Major sturdily maintained, not an out-and-out Supreme Court one, but an astral one, with a twelve-inch telescope as a co-respondent. However that might have been, it left Trumbull Hayden a very faint and ghostly figure to his daughter Theodora Lydia Lorillard, who had her own natural and inherited love for solitude, but could never be alone, just as she could never be free. For always, when she moved about, she did so with a maid or a governess or a groom at her heels. And to add to her misery and her despair of final emancipation, the régime of the governess and the tutor and the dancing-master crept stealthily upon her. It was her second tutor, an Oxford importation with a hot-potato accent and a pale but penetrating eye, whom Teddie adroitly tied up in one of the big library _fauteuils_ and refused to liberate until he had duly recounted the entire story of The Pit and the Pendulum, with The Fall of the House of Usher put in for good measure. And two days later, during tea on the terrace, she put smelling-salts in his cup, the same being not only punishment for an unfavorable conduct-report, but a timely intimation that tittle-tattlers would have short shrift with her.
Then came other tutors and teachers and governesses, each determined in character and each departing in time with a secret consolation check from Uncle Chandler and the conviction that Miss Theodora was anything but the gift of God. And then came boarding-school, boarding-school from which so much was surreptitiously expected. But from this first boarding-school, which had castellated eaves and overlooked the Hudson, Teddie was brought back by her Uncle Chandler in disgrace and a peacock-blue landaulet. A year later the attempt was renewed, it is true, this time in a Quaker establishment with a Welsh name and an imitation Norman arch over its main entrance. But this school, besides being ultra-fashionable in name was also ultra-frugal in all matters of _menu_, and Teddie proved so successful in playing cutthroat poker for “desserts” that seventeen extraneous sweets in one week did not and could not escape the attention of the quiet-eyed maiden-ladies in attendance. So this, added to the gumming up of one of the grand-pianos in the practise-room with five pounds of prohibited chocolate-creams, led to an interview with the lady-principal herself. And even that interview might not have been a valedictory one had Teddie not been detected perusing a copy of Daudet’s _Jack_ during an ancient-history “period,” a Daudet’s _Jack_ from which was unearthed an excellent caricature of the lady-principal herself. So Teddie awoke still again to the discovery that her dream of personal freedom was merely an _ignis fatuus_, and she journeyed homeward, a melancholy loss to the basket-ball team and an even more melancholy accession to the paternal acres at Tuxedo.