He heard her voice going down-stairs saying, "Puss—Puss—Pussy—Min—Min—Min."
When she appeared to him the next day, Minny, the cat, was hanging by his claws on to her shoulder.
"Are you fond of cats, sir?"
"I adore them." (He did.)
"Would you like to have Minny, sir? He'll be nice company for you."
"Ought I to deprive you of his society?"
"I don't mind, sir. I've got the little dogs." She looked at him softly. "And you've got nothing."
"True, Rose. I've got nothing."
That evening, as he sat in his chair, with Rose's cat curled up on his knee, he found himself thinking, preposterously thinking, about Rose.
He supposed she was Mrs. Eldred's daughter. He did not like to think of her as Mrs. Eldred's daughter. She was charming now; but he had a vision of her as she might be in twenty years' time, grown shapeless and immense, and wheezing as Mrs. Eldred wheezed. Yet no; that was too horrible. You could not think of Rose as—wheezing. People did not always take after their mothers. Rose must have had a father. Of course, Eldred was her father; and Eldred was a small man, lean and brown as a beetle; and he had never heard him wheeze.