Her father and her friends championed Steve’s stand in the matter and after a little rebelling and 213 pouting and having the pleasure of seeing her name in all the papers as the owner of the lion cub and so on, Beatrice consented to part with him on the condition that she be allowed to give him a farewell birthday party, he being nearly a year old. She was going to ask the children of all her friends. But getting a hint of the event her friends hastily arranged a Tom Thumb wedding for charity, and then assured Beatrice it was merely a coincidence that the two things interfered with each other, wasn’t it a shame? Realizing that this dominating note was not a social asset Beatrice hastily sided in with her father and the authorities.
Besides, she was tired of Tawny Adonis; he was destructive, and a secret source of worry if she could have been made to admit it. So she prepared for a birthday fête and determined to have the public-school children as the guests. But these refused her invitation as well; so she went into the slums and collected thirty harmless waifs who felt that a lion’s birthday party was not to be despised, and brought them triumphantly into the Italian gardens.
The waifs gathered round an outdoor table, too busy swallowing food to bother about their possible and likely fate. In the centre of the table was a huge birthday cake for Tawny Adonis. It was made of raw hamburger steak, generously iced with bone marrow, and the single anniversary candle took the form of a balanced soup bone. After the children had eaten their fill Tawny Adonis was let loose upon the scene and at the birthday cake, and during the wild smashing of glass and china and the excited shrieks of the waifs Tawny went to the birthday cake and devoured it, soup bone and all.
Gay was out of town the day of the party but Trudy bravely assisted, as did one or two others, Mark Constantine and his sister sitting in the windows to watch the procedure while Beatrice in a gown of turquoise velvet with a coronet of frosted leaves played Lady Bountiful and dismissed the slum brigade as soon as possible, sending them home with the confused knowledge that a beautiful lady in angel clothes and a wild animal sometimes meant plenty of ham sandwiches and ice cream, as well as the opportunity to slip a fork into one’s pocket.
Steve declined to take any part in the celebration, but at the conclusion of the event he appeared with policemen and a patrol wagon containing a cage, and amid gay farewells and grim coaxings Tawny Adonis was escorted to the railway station and shipped back to the circus man, at a loss of five hundred dollars––not counting the damage done––to the Gorgeous Girl!
CHAPTER XV
Trudy was keen as a brier whenever her own realm was threatened. With the shrewdness which caused her to refrain from ever speaking ill of a woman when talking to a man and never speaking aught but ill of women when talking to their own kind, she foresaw in Gay’s constant attendance on the Gorgeous Girl the possibility of an unpleasant situation.
For the Gorgeous Girl had said not only to her husband but to her friends that she must find some other kind of a good time now the novelty of the Villa Rosa was exhausted. Even inky people bored her, she added; poets were no longer permitted in her drawing room, and the circle of pet robins and angel ducks had somehow wandered out of her safe keeping. An unusually pretty flock of sweetsome débutantes had thinned the bachelor ranks, and Jill Briggs’s youngest boy died of some childish ailment, disturbing Beatrice more than she admitted, for some reason, and making her own thoughts poor company.