"I do really. _Why not_?" Low and luringly Irene laughed. "You must look awfully picturesque in your uniform of forest green, your cavalry hat and laced boots."
"Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm a cowman, not a ranger," Pape thought advisable to state in a tone calculated to reach the ears of her responsible for his presence in their midst. "But most of the park service members are my friends. I live on the edge of the playground and know them right well."
The young girl refused to have her enthusiasm quashed. "Well, that's just as good. You have their spirit without being tied to the stake of routine, as it were. I detest routine, don't you? Or _do_ you? On second thought, you're much better off. Don't _you_ think he is, dar-rling?"
In the dimming of the auditorium lights, she leaned closer to him; seemed to transfer the fulsomely drawled term of endearment from her relative to him; added in a cross between murmur and whisper:
"Isn't dar-rling a difficult word--hard to say seriously? Fancy caring that much for any one--I mean any one of one's own sex. Of course, I hope really to love a man that much some day. That is, I do unless I go in for a career. Careers _do_ keep one from getting fat, though. As I am constantly telling my mother----"
Pape was relieved by Mrs. Allen's silencing sibilant.
The great audience caught its breath and hopefully returned attention to the affairs of the French actress who so had shocked and fascinated them at the first act's end. Stripped almost to the waist, the daring and tuneful Zaza had left them. More conventionally, not to say comfortably clad, she reappeared.
Pape, as deficient in French as in appreciation of opera arias, applied himself hopefully at first to getting the gist of the piece, but soon concluded that he must be clear "off trail in his lingo."
Out in Montana, the most meteoric stage luminary never would think of singing a perfectly good wife and mother into handing over husband and father merely because his eyes had gone sort of blinky star-gazing at her. No. Such a translation didn't sound reasonable at all; was quite too raw for the range. Better give his ears to the music and buy a Hoyle-translated libretto to-morrow.