But he must pay attention. Irene, continuing to baby-vamp him, waved him into the chair beside that into which she had sunk. Although of necessity she had dropped his hand she released neither his interest nor his eyes.
"You must be just a terribly important person to be flashed all over Broadway in that rosy wreath. I don't blame your friends, though, for feeling a bit extravagant over you. We were talking about the sign before you came in--were guessing what kingdom you belong to, animal, vegetable or mineral. Millsy Harford here held out that you were more likely some manufactured product than anti-fat. Isn't it all quite too funny for anything?"
"My folks used to say, from the rate of speed at which I grew up--" Pape applied to his ready store of persiflage--"that I was more like a vegetable than a boy. _I_ always thought I was animal, judging by my appetite, you know. But my life's been kind of lived with minerals. Maybe I'm all three."
"How interesting." Mrs. Allen, a lady faded to medium in coloring, age and manner, turned from an over-rail inspection of some social notable among the horseshoe's elect to survey him through her lorgnette. "Just why, if I am not too personal, are you called 'Why-Not?'"
"My nickname about the headwaters of our greatest river, madam."
From her look of vague perplexity Pape turned his glance around the group until it halted for a study of Jane Lauderdale's face--again Irish pale, tropic-eyed, illegible. He chose his further words with care.
"Guess I was the first to ask myself that question after the boys hung the sobri. on me and nailed it there," he said, addressing himself to none in particular. "I made the interesting discovery that there wasn't any answer, although there are limitless answers to almost every seemingly unanswerable question. You see, when I find myself up against the impossible, I just ask myself why not and buck it. I've found the impossible a boogey-boo."
"You call yourself, then, a possible person?"
He was not to be discountenanced by Jane's quiet insertion.
"Everything worth while that I've got in the past I owe to that belief," he maintained. "It happens that I want some few extras in my near future. That's how I'll get 'em, from realizing that nothing--_absolutely nothing_--is impossible."