AMONG THE ANGELIC ORDERS
205
you girls been?" and Simeon waited for the answer.
Sheila and Gretchen looked at each other. "To the zoo!" they
answered gaily together.
"The zoo!"
It
was too absurd. Simeon seemed to approve but
Melvin looked almost angry.
"Oh, we love to go to the zoo," explained Sheila. "The animals
are so wonderfully human. Gretchen just adores the lions, and she
loves the hyenas, don't you," and of course Gretchen nodded.
"But 1 thought," Melvin wondered, "1 thought people went to
see the seals mainly-grownups, 1 mean. Or the monkeys."
"Oh!" chorused the girls. "Not the seals! Never the seals!"
"Seals are so stupid, they have no souls," Sheila specified.
"They're so uninteresting, really, 1 mean, anybody knows that."
"Don't you see, they simply
perform,"
Gretchen elaborated.
"They have no real integrity, not like the lions. And as for the
monkeys-!"
Melvin frowned and seemed unacquainted with these ideas, so
their whole point of view had to be explained. Of course, Gretchen
and Sheila had talked about it all morning, but they loved to perform
for outsiders. And they didn't expect anyone to understand, really.
Simeon, however, said something about the ideas in the East, totems,
the belief in animal spirits, Egypt,and so on. Melvin simply looked
from one to the other. Plainly, he' d never known anyone like them.
At least, it was plain to Gretchen. He said he didn't like most ani–
mals, except for dogs. Then Sheila took it up and explained how dogs
had no spiritual depths, they were almost as bad as seals. Poor Melvin
didn't seem to agree.
"Gretchen must go inside the Museum," Sheila announced pres–
ently. "Gretchen is a painter and she has to see pictures all the time."
But she didn't look so silly as she sounded. Anyhow, silly or not, they
all complied and began moving to the door.
"Where are you going to college," Melvin asked before letting
Gretchen go ahead of him.
"Not going. When 1 finish Music and Art I'll leave and take a
place somewhere. How can 1 go to college if 1 want to be a
p~inter?"
Then she whirled inside the Museum.
Melvin considered this and then followed her. He was studying
Education at Brooklyn College so he said to her when he got inside,
