“Do. They don’t often take time to go to museums.”
Steve’s bad nature was getting the better of polite resolves. He was thinking of Mary’s clear, witty eyes as she would view the remains of a plain American house.
The next thing of interest to keep Beatrice at home was the advent of a real lion cub, following Monster’s departure to canine heaven. Being too impossible of shape and disposition for any one’s pride or comfort, Monster was disposed of and buried in a satin-lined coffin with a neat white headstone telling salient facts of her short existence.
While Steve was giving devout thanks for the event Beatrice was realizing that the gardens needed a dominating note, as Gay said. During her reading of old fables and romantic legends about superwomen or extremely wicked matrons she had discovered that they nearly all possessed a lion or a bear or a brace of elephants to gambol on the green. Such a pet symbolized its owner’s power and fearlessness, and any young woman who could have the Emperor of China’s bedroom suite brought post haste into Hanover, U. S. A., was surely entitled to something in the jungle line for her front yard!
For the first time in his daughter’s life Mark Constantine made a faint protest, suggesting that she have a taxidermist mount several lion cubs and group them about the hall––while Steve sat back in cynical amusement and asked if she were going to request the goldfish to step aside in favour of a few Alaska seals?
“If she gets a live lion––and she will, because I’m writing to a circus man now,” Gay told Trudy––“I’m going to sprain my ankle and be laid up from the day the beast arrives until he goes––he won’t tarry long, the police won’t have it. But I’m not going to take any chances. Still, it would never do to make a fat commission on the deal and then act as if I were afraid to come over and play cannibal 212 with him. I guess you can go,” he added, insolently.
Trudy looked at him in scorn. “You are cheap,” she said. “Well, I will go! I’d just as soon be eaten by a lion as to have to live with a shrimp.”
The lion arrived in due time and was named Tawny Adonis. Beatrice considered him a perfect love. He was a gay young cub and quite effective in the new background, well intentioned but lonesome for his old atmosphere of circus life and his mother and brothers. He was given a large run in the Constantine grounds, and while Aunt Belle stayed locked in her room the greater share of the time and Gay immediately sprained his ankle and was forced to send Trudy as his messenger, Mark Constantine and Steve found their time well occupied in convincing the authorities that the town infantry would not be devoured piecemeal. Hanover had never really approved of having an Italian villa crammed down its throat, and it was certainly not agreeable, to say the least, to have a lion cub at large as a dominating garden note.
“You cannot keep him, even if you pulled all his teeth and taught him to be a dope fiend,” Steve said in desperation after the roars of Tawny Adonis had been reported to the police as annoying. “He is growing bigger every day and all he has done is demolish flowers and shrubs and chew up fence posts. I’m sorry for him, and I’m not particularly afraid of him, but if there was an accident with a child even the owner of a dominating garden note could not expect to go scot-free.”