“She has the same fluffy, light hair—hairpins can't keep it down, and she looks at you in that same sort of surprised way with her head on one side when you hand in your check.”
“Why, it's true to the life!” cried Eda enthusiastically. “She thinks she's got all the men cinched,—she does and she's forty if she's a day.”
These comparisons brought them to a pitch of risible enjoyment amply sustained by the spectacle in the monkey cage, to which presently they turned. A chimpanzee, with a solicitation more than human, was solemnly searching a friend for fleas in the midst of a pandemonium of chattering and screeching and chasing, of rattling of bars and trapezes carried on by their companions.
“Well, young ladies,” said a voice, “come to pay a call on your relations—have ye?”
Eda giggled hysterically. An elderly man was standing beside them. He was shabbily dressed, his own features were wizened, almost simian, and by his friendly and fatuous smile Janet recognized one of the harmless obsessed in which Hampton abounded.
“Relations!” Eda exclaimed.
“You and me, yes, and her,” he answered, looking at Janet, though at first he had apparently entertained some doubt as to this inclusion, “we're all descended from them.” His gesture triumphantly indicated the denizens of the cage.
“What are you giving us?” said Eda.
“Ain't you never read Darwin?” he demanded. “If you had, you'd know they're our ancestors, you'd know we came from them instead of Adam and Eve. That there's a fable.”
“I'll never believe I came from them,” cried Eda, vehement in her disgust.