"Get a hurry on, party! At one-and-fifty there'd ought to be better _parlez vous_ places inside."
Perhaps his inclusive gesture was more comprehensive to them than his words; at any rate, his grin was eloquent.
To his sublet box by way of the grand staircase Peter Stanbury Pape, grand opera patron, strode at the usher's heels; into it, himself ushered his agitated, magpie covey of true music-lovers. Well to one side he slumped into the chair assigned to him by common consent and found an inconspicuous rest for the more tortured of his feet.
Leaning forward, he undertook to get his bearings; concentrated on the dim and distant stage set, where a lady chiefly dressed in an anklet and feathered hat--presumedly Zaza of the title role from the way she was conducting herself--seemed to be under great stress of emotion set to song. Before he could focus his glasses--one of the pairs for all hands round which he had been persuaded to rent at the foot of the stair-case--the orchestra took control and the red velvet curtains came together between the intimate affairs of the great French actress and those of the many--of the great American audience.
After curtain calls had been duly accorded and recognized and there no longer existed any reason for the half-light cloak of a doubtful song-story, the vast auditorium was set ablaze. And with the illumination uprose a buzz of sound like nothing that Pape ever had heard--more like the swarming of all the bees in Montana within an acre of area than anything he could imagine.
Full attention he gave to the _entre-acte_ of this, his first adventure in Orphean halls. Regretting the trusty binoculars idling on his hotel bureau, he screwed into focus the rented glasses; swept the waving head-tops of the orchestra field below; lifted to the horse-shoe of the subscribers and then to the grand tier boxes with their content of women whom he assumed to be of society, amazingly made up, daringly gowned, lavishly bedecked with jewels, ostrich feathers and aigrettes. A sprinkling of men, black-togged on the order of himself, made them the more wondrous dazzling. A moving, background pageant of visitors paid them court.
After a polite, if rather futile, attempt to mix his English, as spoken for utility in Montana, with the highly punctuated, mostly superfluous French of his overly grateful "party," Pape left them to their own devices. These seemed largely to take the form of dislocating their necks in an effort to recognize possible acquaintances in the sea of faces which the gallery was spilling down from the roof. Remembering his advice to Polkadot over the value of concentration on the near-by, he centered his attention upon those labeled in his mind as the "hundred-and-fifty simoleon" class. His thoughts moved along briskly with his inspection.