“Oh, no, really? Let me lend you Todhunter.”
“No, thanks.”
“Perhaps you’re wise. Apart from dry hash, he’s a rotten cook.”
“Really? What a battle of giants it will be when they start cooking for each other!”
“Yes.”
Kay stooped and tickled the kitten under the ear, then walked quickly toward the house. The kitten, having subjected Sam to a long and critical scrutiny, decided that he promised little entertainment to an active-minded cat and galloped off in pursuit of a leaf. Sam sighed and went in to have a bath.
Some little time later, the back door of Mon Repos opened from within as if urged by some irresistible force, and the dog Amy came out to take the morning air.
Dogs are creatures of swiftly changing moods. Only a few hours before, Amy, in the grip of a dreadful depression caused by leaving the public house where she had spent her girlhood—for, in case the fact is of interest to anyone, Hash had bought her for five shillings from the proprietor of the Blue Anchor at Tulse Hill—had been making the night hideous with her lamentations. Like Rachel, she had mourned and would not be comforted. But now, to judge from her manner and a certain jauntiness in her walk, she had completely resigned herself to the life of exile. She scratched the turf and sniffed the shrubs with the air of a lady of property taking a stroll round her estates. And when Hash, who did not easily forgive, flung an egg at her out of the kitchen window so that it burst before her on the gravel, she ate the remains lightheartedly, as one who feels that the day is beginning well.
The only flaw in the scheme of things seemed to her to consist in a lack of society. By nature sociable, she yearned for company, and for some minutes roamed the garden in quest of it. She found a snail under a laurel bush, but snails are reserved creatures, self-centred and occupied with their own affairs, and this one cut Amy dead, retreating into its shell with a frigid aloofness which made anything in the nature of camaraderie out of the question.