Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/27

Rh wrinkles in Teddie's mental makeup. 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 disembowled 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