She hadn’t thought the whole world contained so many people as she saw in New York in one day.  Fifth Avenue amazed and absorbed more than it delighted her.  The expressionless expressions of the women, their hand-made faces, their smart shoes, the way they wore their hair, the way they wore their clothes; the men’s air of being well dressed, of having money to spend, of appearing importantly busy at any cost; a certain pretentiousness, as if everything were shown at once and there were no reserve of power, nothing held in disciplined abeyance, interested her profoundly.  She had a native shrewdness.

“They’re just like the same kind of folks back home, but there’s more of ’em here,” she decided.

The huge policemen she saw at every turn, lordly and massive monoliths rising superbly above lesser humanity, filled her with the deepest respect and admiration.  The mere policemen in her home town were to these magnificent beings as daubs to Titians, as pigmies to Titans.  If in those first days the girl had been called upon to do the seven bendings and the nine knockings before the one New York institution which impressed her most profoundly, she undoubtedly would have singled out one of those mastodons a-bossing everything and everybody, with a prize-ham paw.

She was cold to the Woolworth Building, as indifferent to the Sherman monument as Mr. Chadwick Champneys was acridly averse to it, and not at all interested in the Public Library.  The Museum of Natural History failed to win any applause from her; the Metropolitan Museum bored her interminably, there was so much of it.  Most of the antiquities she thought so much junk, and the Egyptian and Assyrian remains were so obviously the plunder of old graveyards that she couldn’t for the life of her understand why anybody should wish to keep them above ground.

Mr. Champneys explained, patiently.  He wished, by way of aiding and abetting the education he had in view for her, to arouse her interest in these remains of a lost and vanished world.

She stood by the glass case that contains the old brown mummied priest with his shaven skull, his long, narrow feet, his flattened nose and fleshless hands, and the mark of the embalmer’s stone knife still visible upon his poor old empty stomach.  And she didn’t like him at all.  There was something grisly and repellent to her in the idea that living people should make of this poor old dead man a spectacle for idle curiosity.

“There was a feller in our town used to keep stuffed snakes an’ monkeys an’ birds, an’ dried grasshoppers an’ bugs an’ things like that in glass cases; but I never dreamed in all my born life that anybody’d want to keep dried people,” she commented disgustedly.  “I don’t see no good in it:  it’s sickenin’.”  She turned her back upon mummied Egypt with a gesture of aversion.  “For Gawdsake let’s go see somethin’ alive!”