“What is Minnie?”
“Our cat.”
“Why do you give him a female name?”
“I don’t know. Father always calls him she. Father hates cats.”
She had told him this before.
“An’ Father’s so nervy nowadays, you don’t know what to do with him. It gets harder and harder to live there at all. Father spends so much money on—on small things we don’t need. There often isn’t enough to eat an’ . . .”
He heard a train snort in the distance like a dragon, and the wood round reared itself in tall crowding shapes and dark images. A voice droned complaint and he saw a little figure at the foot of an image throwing words at the things which hemmed her in.
“. . . but he doesn’t care, he never thinks of me, it’s me who has always to be thinking of him, how to keep him alive, how to keep the home round his head, how to manage so’s he won’t starve. Always thinking of him, I am, and he with never a thought to me.”
“Poor June.”
“Yes, it is poor June. You don’t know what it is with your easy life down there. There’s times when you don’t know if your own life’s safe when the fit is on him, he’s so dangerous.”