Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/54

44 predicaments of shop-girls have got to do with the matter," he said with some acerbity. "You're a Hayden, the third wealthiest woman in Orange County, and a girl who's had every comfort that money and machinery can give her. Yet you leave a home that cost about two-thirds of a million—without counting those cross-eyed marble lions your mother brought over from Florence for the Sunken Gardens!—and come down here into this moth-eaten backyard of the Eighth Ward and live on macaroni and red ink and dream that raw life is being dished up to you on the half-shell. You talk about liberty and expressing yourself, and all you're doing is slumming, just slumming!"

Teddie smiled. It was a languid smile and a superior one.

"Uncle Chandler," she remarked, "you really don't know what you're talking about. In the first place, I've decided that in one day you can see more life, real life, out of that crooked old window there than you could discern in Tuxedo Park in a century." She ushered him toward the