She had been sitting on her haunches blinking at him when he raised his voice or gestured, and the crowd has never yet gathered on this earth in the temple of Baal or Jehovah that can resist a cat accompaniment to the functions of a priest.
When Gordon looked the little cat full in the face, she liked him at once, and in the softest, friendliest treble said:
“Meow!”
And the crowd burst into incontrollable laughter.
At first the full import of the situation did not reach his mind, he was so stunned with surprise. He stood looking at the cat in helpless stupor, and blushing red. And then the sickening certainty crushed him that the day was lost; that it was beyond the power of human genius, or the reach of the spirit of God, to remove that cat and regain control of his audience.
He turned sick with anger and humiliation, and his big bear-like hands clasped his sheet of notes and slowly crushed them.
He continued to look at the cat and she cocked her head to one side, opened her yellow eyes wider and, slowly, in grieved accents said:
“M-e-o-w!”
Which unmistakably meant, “I’m very sorry you don’t like me as well as I do you.”
Again the crowd laughed.