"What is a barn?" asked the black kitten.
"A barn is like a house, but there is only one room, and no carpets, only straw."
"I should like that," said the yellow kitten, who often played among the straw in the big box which brought groceries from the Stores.
"I liked it well enough when I was your age," said the mother indulgently, "but a barn is not at all a genteel place to be born in. My mother had had a little unpleasantness with the family she lived with, and, of course, she was too proud to stay on after that. And so she left them, and went to live in the barn. It wasn't at all the sort of life she had been accustomed to."
"What was the unpleasantness?" Sweep asked.
"Well, it was about some cream which the woman of the house wanted for her tea. She should have said so. Of course, my mother would not have taken it if she had had any idea that any one else wanted it. She was always most unselfish."
"What is tea?"
"A kind of brown milk—very nasty indeed, and very bad for you. Well, I lived with my brothers and sisters very happily for some months, for I was too young to know how vulgar it was to live in a barn and play with straw."
"What is vulgar, mother?"
"Dear, dear; how you do ask questions," said the brindled cat, beginning to look worried. "Vulgar is being like everybody else."