Toi Wah was mated with another Tartar cat of high degree, and became the mother of a kitten.
And such a mother! Only the hard heart made cruel by fear would remain unsoftened by the great cat’s untiring devotion to her kitten.
Everywhere she went she carried it in her mouth; never leaving it alone for a moment, seeming to sense its danger from me; an abnormal, hated cat!
However, she seemed to relent even toward me if I happened to pass her chair when she was nursing the little creature.
At such times she would lay stretching out her legs, opening and shutting her great paws in a sort of ecstasy, purring her utter content. She would look up at me, maternal pride and joy glowing in her yellow eyes, soft and lustrous now, the hate and suspicion of me crowded out by mother love.
“Look!” she seemed to say. “Look at this wonderful thing I have created out of my body! Do you not love it?”
I did not love it. No! On the contrary, it intensified my hate by adding another object to it.
My grandmother added fuel to the fire by sending me out to the shops to buy delicacies for Toi Wah and her kitten; liverwurst and catnip for the mother, milk and cream for the kitten.
“Robert, my son,” she would say to me, all unaware of my hatred, “Do you know we have quite a royal family with us? These wonderful cats are descended in an unbroken line from the cats of the Royal Household of Ghengis Khan. The records were kept in the Buddhist Monastery from which Toi Wah came.”
“How did Grandfather get her?” I asked.