He looked at her a bit helplessly.  Plainly, this young person’s education wasn’t to be tackled off-hand!  Agreeably to her wishes he took her to a certain famous shop filled at that hour with fashionable women wonderfully groomed and gowned.  Here, seated at a small table, lingering over her ice-cream, Nancy was all observant eyes and ears.  Not being a woman, however, Mr. Champneys was not aware that her proper education was distinctly under way.

A day or two later he took her to the Bronx Zoo.  Here he caught a glimpse of Nancy Simms that made him prick up his ears and pull his mustache, thoughtfully.  He had discovered how appallingly ignorant she was, how untrained, how undisciplined.  To-day he saw how really young she was.  She ran from cage to cage.  Her laughter made the corners of his mouth turn up sympathetically.

There was something pathetic in her eager enjoyment, something so fresh and unspoiled in that laughter of hers that one felt drawn to her.  When she forgot to narrow her eyes, or to furrow her forehead, or to screw up her mouth, she was almost attractive, despite her freckles!  Her eyes, of an agaty gray-green, were transparently honest.  She had brushed the untidy mop of red hair, parted it in the middle, and wore it in a thick bright plait, tied with a black ribbon.  She wore a simple middy blouse and a well-made blue skirt.  Altogether, she looked more like a normal young girl than he had yet seen her.

The Zoo enchanted her.  She hurried from house to house.  Once, she told him, when she was a little kid, a traveling-man had taken her to a circus, because he was sorry for her.  That was the happiest day she had ever spent; it stood out bright and golden in her memory.  There had been a steam-piano hoo-hooing “Wait till the clouds roll by, Jenny.”  Wasn’t a steam-piano perfectly grand?  She liked it better than anything she’d ever heard.  She’d long ago made up her mind that if she was ever really rich and had a place of her own, she’d have a big circus steam-piano out in the barn, and she’d play it on Sundays and holidays—­hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo—­like that, you know.

And to-day reminded her of that long-ago circus day, with even more animals to look at!  She had never seen as many different animals as she wanted to see, until now.  She admitted that she sort of loved wild things—­she even liked the wild smell of ’em.  There was something in here—­she touched her breast lightly—­that felt kin to them.

There was not the usual horde of visitors, that day being a pay-day.  A bearded man with a crutch was showing one or two visitors around, and at a word from him a keeper unlocked a cage door, to allow a young chimpanzee to leap into his arms.  It hugged him, exhibiting extravagant affection; it thrust out its absurd muzzle to kiss his cheek, and patted him with its small, leathery, unpleasantly human hands.

“It’s just like any other baby,” said the keeper, petting it.