I was greatly excited about our own baby, and oh! how I longed to see it, but my turn did not come for several weeks.
Master used to motor out every afternoon to see how mother and child were getting on, but I was always left in the car, till one day, when I squealed wildly for permission to go in, master took me into the big hospital, and a nurse wiped me all over with a damp cloth which had something on it that smelled queer. I think she was afraid of germs.
When I was ushered into the sunny, lovely room where sat my mistress, I felt all broken up. She was as thin as a scarecrow, and just about as good-looking.
“See, Rudolph,” cried the poor thing, “even the dog scarcely knows me.”
After that, there was nothing to do but to run up to her, wag my tail, twist my body, and pretend that I was charmed to see her. Perhaps I should not say pretend. I really, by this time, had gotten to be so sorry for my poor mistress, that I pitied her—and when a dog pities any one, it is only a step to love. Then I was sincerely and truly delighted about the baby, because it had made my master happy, quite happy. Of course, I should be jealous of it, but truly, when master held it down for me to look at it, and I saw how gentle, and harmless and helpless it was, with nothing but those two balled-up fists to defend itself against the big, powerful world, something swelled up inside me, and I vowed a good dog vow, that if any other dog started to molest that little lump of flesh, I’d tear him limb from limb.
I licked its little dress, and the nurse ran to get a dish with some solution in it to wash the place I’d touched. Really, these nurses and doctors carry things too far with their germ theories. Why wasn’t master just as likely to have germs as I. We had both come through the same parts of the city. Besides, I’m as clean as a whistle. Every day Louis brushes me, and cleans my ears, and occasionally I have a bath. Not too often, for it is not natural for dogs to be kept in soak. Well—to come back to the day of my first visit to the baby. Master was so pleased to think I liked the baby, that I got an extra share of petting on the way home.
We were alone in the car, and I was sitting close up beside him. As we were passing through Mount Vernon I began to think of [the Lady Gay cat]. That cat had been on my mind for a long time, and one evening I had scampered down to her eating-house on Sixth Avenue to see how she was getting along.
She was not there. She had left some time ago, another cat told me, after I had persuaded him to stand long enough for me to question him. I wondered what had become of her. Had she found her way back to this pretty place to her own good mistress, or was she dead or perhaps stolen again?
THE LADY GAY CAT