"Well—I won't have such goings on, and that's all there is to it."
Danner collected the débris. He buried the tadpoles. One was dissected first. Then he wrote for a long time in his notebook. After that he went out and, with some difficulty, secured a pregnant cat. A week later he chloroformed the tabby and inoculated her. Then he waited. He had been patient for a long time. It was difficult to be patient now.
When the kittens were born into this dark and dreary world, Mr. Danner assisted as sole obstetrician. In their first hours nothing marked them as unique. The professor selected one and drowned the remainder. He remembered the tadpoles and made a simple calculation.
When the kitten was two weeks old and its eyes opened, it was dieting on all its mother's milk and more besides. The professor considered that fact significant. Then one day it committed matricide.
Probably the playful blow of its front paw was intended in the best spirit. Certainly the old tabby, receiving it, was not prepared for such violence from its offspring. Danner gasped. The kitten had unseamed its mother in a swift and horrid manner. He put the cat out of its misery and tended the kitten with trepidation. It grew. It ate—beefsteaks and chops, bone and all.
When it reached three weeks, it began to jump alarmingly. The laboratory was not large enough. The professor brought it its food with the expression of a man offering a wax sausage to a hungry panther.
On a peaceful Friday evening Danner built a fire to stave off the rigours of a cold snap. He and Mrs. Danner sat beside the friendly blaze. Her sewing was in her lap, and in his was a book to which he paid scant attention. The kitten, behind its locked door, thumped and mewed.
"It's hungry," Mrs. Danner said. "If you must keep a cat, why don't you feed it?"
"I do," he answered. He refrained, for politic reasons, from mentioning what and how much he fed it. The kitten mewed again.
"Well," she repeated, "it sounds hungry."